CITY OF GRAYS, CITY OF GRACE
The palette of leaden grays mixed with luminous brilliance in Renato “Jojo” Barja Jr.’s Highway Hand Me Downs (Pamana Ng Kalsada) possesses a heavy familiarity in a city that has been drenched in neverending rain and drowned in unremitting floods.
The exhibition title is a lyric borrowed from “Refuge of the Roads,” a Joni Mitchell song that talks of a drunk with sage’s eyes, drifters, thieves, and taking refuge in the roads.
Wandering through the city with the eye of a flâneur, Barja, whether on his two feet or on his bicycle, collects discarded objects and shadow folk. Painted between 2024, in Barja’s old Parañaque studio, and 2026, the seven works in Highway Hand Me Downs (Pamana Ng Kalsada) reflect Barja’s headspace as he grapples—and continues to grapple—with the grief of an adult who has become orphaned and has become keenly aware of things left behind, of things unfinished, of things surrendering to time, age, and oblivion.
In Fallen Barricade (2024), a rusted bollard—strangled by its own caution tape—lies on a green bed of vines and delivers its warning to no one; the black-on-yellow chevrons and zebra stripes of Unfinished (2024) are obscured by ivy, their message of sharp curves, narrowing roads, and obstructions lost to neglect; in Invisible King I (2026) and Turn to Stone (2026), a pair of chairs suffer the same abandoned fate despite having lived different lives (the first was a plush piece of red furniture; the second, an improvisation assembled from scraps).
In contrast to the inanimate objects in Highway Hand Me Downs (Pamana Ng Kalsada), the people who live in Barja’s inundated city have been bled of all color, their vitality sucked out of them until all that is left is sallow resignation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Mr. Merchandise (2026), where an ashen street peddler walking through flood is framed by a random rainbow of sundries (flowers, pinwheels, flags). Similarly, the lead-hued men in Back Job (2026) and Clean Cut II (2025) are surrounded by flashes of color: a red basin, blue-striped button-up, teal walls, a red-striped barber cape.
In The Luminous and the Grey—a slim volume that meditates on urban life, the color gray, and its relationship to other colors—artist and writer David Batchelor captures the mood that Barja has imbued his canvases for fifteen years:
Grey here marks the relentless movement from hope to despair. In this grey there is a reminder of what was and what might have been and what cannot now be. Grey is the colour of loss and the colour of losing. It is not the colour of death, perhaps, but of purgatory; grey is suspended: no longer white but not yet black; hardly alive but not yet dead; drifting slowly away from existence and towards extinction.¹
Still relevant to Highway Hand Me Downs (Pamana Ng Kalsada), Batchelor ruminates on the mutually amplifying relationship between muted shades of gray and its more brilliant cousins; and how this relationship is demonstrated in the city, a kaleidoscopic nexus composed of gray streets, gray pavement, gray galvanized steel, and plasticky “shiny industrial colour.”²
The grey makes the luminous more luminous and the luminous makes the grey so much greyer. . . . The city is at the intersection of the luminous and the grey, or is itself that intersection. And this is not just a fact of the colour space of the city but one of its defining qualities.³
For Barja, there is one specific city: Metro Manila, a megalopolis of about 14 million souls, ever besieged by traffic, catastrophic downpours, and a litany of other disasters. And yet—and yet—Barja believes that amid the grayness of Metro Manila, there is “a little spark of hope every day.” To end, we turn to Nick Joaquin, who rhapsodized on the same resilient city that Barja bears witness to in Highway Hand Me Downs (Pamana Ng Kalsada):
It almost seems as if every problem, every crisis, arises just to prove the aliveness of this city; continually destroyed and continually rebuilt, ever decaying and ever re-greening.⁴
—ll, September 2026
NOTES
- David Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey (Reaktion Books, 2014), 64.
- Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey, 40.
- Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey, 60–61.
- Nick Joaquin, Manila, My Manila: A History for the Young (Anvil Publishing, 1999).