The late great Onib Olmedo paved the way for a once-marginalized genre into mainstream art, depicting the world as he saw it—spontaneously, instinctively, uniquely. JACK TEOTICO pays a tribute to the man who played by his own rules and inspired a whole generation of artists to do the same.
Untitled, 1982. 63 x 48 cm, Oil on board
From the Jose Y. Quiros Collection.
The invitation announcing the launch of Alice Guillermo’s much-awaited book on Onib Olmedo, titled Onib Olmedo: Dimensions of Depth (Cultural Center of the Philippines, 2008), referred to the artist as: “the landmark Filipino artist of the 20th century who has played a major role in the history of Philippine art, exerting vast influence on a whole new generation of artists through figurative expressionist paintings that explore the inner recesses of the soul, affirming the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.”
Olmedo’s influence on Philippine art is undeniably powerful. A few months ago, before the financial meltdown, in the executive offices of a major investment bank in Singapore, an investment banker handling corporate lending for the Asian region was commenting on the robust growth in interest for Southeast Asian art worldwide.
He is a discerning collector carefully guided by his own personal taste and a keen observer of the art market. “There is more interest now in contemporary art. In fact, I noticed what sells are the edgier ones, artworks that are at times referred to as to as “dark” or “dangerous” art. To support his observations he pointed not only to Filipino artworks that sell at auctions but also those that are popular in galleries in Singapore carrying Philippine art.
Some pundits in the local art scene believe that today’s crop of contemporary art is popular due to their impact (large paintings are currently preferred) or the shock value of their subject matter, contemporary paintings become popular as they become instant conversation pieces. These reasons are valid but the truth appears to be more than that. Others hypothesize that contemporary art, as what it has evolved to be, is here to stay because it reflects the thinking, aspirations, visions and dreams of today’s current crop of collectors.
Interestingly enough, Onib Olmedo, a good 40 years ago, was already painting “dangerous”, “dark” or “edgy”: back during the times when such art was still called “scary” art.
BACKNational Artist Fernando Cueto Amorsolo’s images might reflect now-unfamiliar scenes of a long-gone era, but, as Reuben Ramas Cañete writes, the maestro was truly way ahead of his time.
Fernando Amorsolo's "Planting Rice with Mayon Volcano", 1949, 70 x 100.5 cm, Oil on canvas
From the Del Monte Collection
Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Manila
Perhaps the most widely recognized and beloved artist of the Philippines, Fernando Cueto Amorsolo (1892-1972) has been invariably categorized as a classicist, academic artist, or impressionist. This is based on the contention that his paintings and drawings of the Philippine rural countryside and its hardworking peasants, sensual country lasses (known as dalagang bukid), and portraits of Manila’s privileged elite are based on a classical tradition stretching back to the Renaissance and Neoclassical roots of Western figurative art, an artform that has seen fit not only to canonize figures like Leonardo, Rembrandt, or Poussin, but also to hark back to an even earlier tradition of figure painting now lost to us, the Greco-Roman wall frescoes and panel paintings from the 5th Century BC to the 3rd Century AD, and extolled by such writers as Herodotus, Epicurius, Cicero, or Pliny.
However, the historical conditions that Amorsolo lived in, the audiences that either eagerly sought out or criticized his work, and the nation-state that he was a part of is undeniably modern in its conception and practice. This much is in evidence when one views cursorily the few authoritative publications on Amorsolo since 1975, when the Filipinas Foundation published the landmark bio-coffee table book on the artist written by Alfredo Roces; as well as this year’s seven-museum extravaganza on Amorsolo in Manila with the theme His Art, Our Heart. Indeed, the national scope of Amorsolo’s contribution to a sense of common identity in this year’s exhibition program was expanded when one of the participating museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, executed 20 “satellite” exhibitions on Amorsolo, from Vigan City in the north to Zamboanga City in the south, dealing with various aspects of Amorsolo’s agricultural-rural milieu.
This “nationality” should be kept in mind as we assess the aesthetic and art historical position of Amorsolo in Philippine Art. Often, the nationalist angle of art production is sublimated based on formal or connoisseurly interests, and instead is sealed within a hermetic envelope of literature that explains away the subject as a matter of “artistic license” or “available material” that is then transformed magically by “the genius of the artist” into a universal and humanist assertion of the resulting artwork’s “timelessness,” evocation of “eternal values,” and assertion of the artist’s inclusion into the canon of great art. Doubtless, this very argument actually identifies the aesthetic narrative of, say Amorsolo, as a by-product of the processes of modernism, because we locate modernism not only in terms of the specifically distorting and reductive practices associated with such 20th Century art forms as Expressionism or Abstraction, but as a set of ideas and consequent practices grounded in modernizing processes that have been at work since the Renaissance.
BACKWith a new show called Dawnscapes in the offing, Juvenal Sanso explains a process he used called reverse painting, and why an inclination for going against the grain has propelled his career into a long, illustrious one.
WORDS TARA FT SERING
Juvenal Sanso's "Waves of Gold", Acrylic on canvas
READ MOREAt the recent awarding ceremony of the Shell Art Awards at the Ayala Museum, guest of honor Juvenal Sanso shared a brief inspirational speech to a packed, standing-room hall of young artists, many of them students, then zipped off to his second appointment for the evening: an art appreciation lecture at the Alliance Francaise. This time, his audience was somewhat different —a smaller crowd of well-heeled ladies seated in the French cultural arm’s second floor auditorium.
After a five-decade stint in Paris, Juvenal Sanso—painter, printmaker, photographer, and theater designer—now calls Manila home, where he divides his time between painting and sharing the wisdom of his experience. One might be tempted to describe this as an unhurried life of leisure; on the contrary, Sanso’s calendar thus far has been packed with numerous commitments and projects. In April 2008, the SM Foundation, in cooperation with Pilipinas Shell, launched a DVD entitled Sanso by the Book at the SMX Convention Center. The commemorative video, which doubles as instructional material in art appreciation geared largely towards students, features the works and lectures of Sanso. The April event was a double celebration: the launch of the video book and, in line with SM Foundation’s education advocacy, the turnover of the first set of DVDs to finalists of the 41st Shell National Arts Student Competition.
Perhaps one of the hallmarks of true artistic discipline includes exceptional time management—barely having wrapped up the Shell arts contest, of which he was a judge, a show during the annual European festival in Singapore, he’s once again in the thick of staging a new exhibit inspired by an a technique calls reverse painting.
Why Reverse Painting?
“Because it is done on black canvas!” the artist enthuses, poring over a stack of black paper sheets he has just unearthed from his files. It contains two- to- three-decades-old renderings of stage and costume designs from his work in European theater, a rather colorful period in his career that inspired his adventures in reverse painting.
Each sculpture by Gabriel Barredo is a striking bravura performance of the artist’s hyperactive and surreal imagination, obsessive craftsmanship, and a host of unlikely media—from carved rubber, to bed springs, to shoe polish locks. And unlike his works, the reason why he does what he does is surprisingly simple.
By Tara FT Sering
Photographs by Nicky Sering
Detail of Gabriel Barredo's "Setting Angels Free"
You can tell by the work that Gabriel Barredo produces that he’s not exactly one to do anything half-baked. His own home, in a quiet suburb south of Manila, is the street’s main attraction with its frontage of lush trees and a curtain of long, slim vines reminiscent of those found in old estates, intricate wrought-iron gates and window rails, and sculpted human figures cast in all white hanging overhead like floating sentries. The general look is difficult to encapsulate tidily into a particular architectural or design style, and this is perhaps the goal of the whole exercise. This is exactly the kind of house that makes you do a double take.
In life and home, as in his art, Barredo is relentless in his pursuit of details and the results they produce when assembled, first in his artist’s mind, then in his studio. “I don’t like things that are flat,” Barredo says, albeit uncertainly, because the truth of the matter is that he doesn’t really know of another way of doing things.
“This changes all the time. As soon as I get tired of it, I move things around,” he says, referring to the setup in his living room. It’s hard to tell what the centerpiece of the high-ceilinged room is—one wall has an almost ceiling to floor drapery of tiny plastic toy babies strung together, another has cast a human figure with an large eye for a head and backdrop of hundreds of Kiwi shoe polish locks glued together and glossed over with a metallic finish. At the center of the room is a large square glass tabletop and a spread of canapés, whipped up by Barredo himself, and a tray of small cakes. Barredo’s attention to detail extends to even the otherwise mundane activity of late afternoon refreshments.
Fresh from a successful one-month solo show at the Soka Art Center in Beijing two weeks before the Olympics—where he curated his own show and covered the entire art space with velvet fabric to serve as backdrop to his pieces—Barredo has returned to the rhythm of his home, which he confesses he hardly ever leaves except when he drives to a favorite beachside retreat in Batangas. “I work at an even pace because I don’t like rushing a piece,” he says. “I normally only schedule shows every three years so I can take my time.” The last show he put together, entitled [IN] VISIBLE was at the Ayala Museum in 2005.
His art does take a lot of time and effort. Of his process, he says, “I put something together, and when I see that it’s not quite what I intended it to be, or that it can become something better or something else entire, I take it apart and start over.”
BACKRiel Hilario traces the evolution of the works of contemporary women artists Marina Cruz-Garcia, Annie Cabigting, Nona Garcia, Geraldine Javier and Yasmin Sison-Ching
Geraldine Javier's "One Leads to Oblivion, The Other to Sorrow", 2005, 122x183 cm, Oil on canvas
Image courtesy of Christie's Images Ltd. 2008
A decade ago it was fashionable—even unavoidable—to discuss art by Filipina artists alongside gender issues. In a time of regional and national change and turmoil, the pertinent and pressing concerns of such discourses shaped the cultural and artistic world of the late 80’s to 90’s. In an art scene dominated by men, it was not unexpected for women artists to assert themselves as such. The byword was social relevance, and women’s art was a part of an endeavor to understand the ideological dimensions of cultural and social life.
But discourse, looming large over art, oftentimes bypasses the visual to the textual, or the artwork to the theory. Criticism of art is drawn from the context and code of the work to come face to face once more to the artwork, to the object, to the image. While the approach of gender discourse remains tenable to thresh the works of senior and mid-career practitioners, the works of a new generation of young Filipina painters challenge the parameters and the paradigms that come with the territory. Five artists: Marina Cruz-Garcia, Yasmin Sison-Ching, Nona Garcia, Annie Cabigting and Geraldine Javier, exemplify such a new horizon of painting.
All five artists stand out in the contemporary art scene due to a number of important occurrences. First, they are part of an overwhelming charge of young artists in the art scene as a response to the positive response to their work in the regional auctions of Singapore and Hong Kong.
Second, their compelling exhibitions over the past three years have introduced a new level of imagery and craftmanship, (where, incidentally most if not all have gained very good sales). Add to this the fact that all five names have emerged in the roster of winners and shortlists of prestigious awards. Public recognition of their works, critically and commercially brings us to foreground questions: what do their works say? What can they mean? And what do their works hold in the discussion of contemporary art?
© Contemporary Art Philippines 2010
