A look at the body of works by the country’s premier glassmeister shows how and why he’s a cut above the rest
BY CID V. REYES
Image: Detail of “Flight at Sunrise”, 2009, Carved amber crystal, 38 x 30 x 13 cm.
“An amorphous, inorganic, usually transparent or translucent substance consisting of a mixture of silicates--or sometimes borates or phosphates--formed by a fusion of silica (or of oxides of boron or phosphorous) with a flux and a stabilizer into a mass that cools to a rigid condition without crystallization.”
In one word: glass.
Understanding its technical nature ironically, but justly, fails to reveal its essence, which is light, and whose deliverance from matter can only be achieved by Herculean effort—and the patience of Job—through the mediation of tools and equipment that are the very instruments of technology and the industrial age: diamond cutters, high-speed grinders and sandblasters, abetted by the use of tungsten carbide tips and carborundum. And yet in the hands of a master, this hard, unwieldy, cold and seemingly imperturbable material can be transformed into something magical: as of liquid solidified, frozen in time, whose gleaming body by turns reflects and refracts that most elusive of illusions: light. Thus, by a feat of creation is matter involved into spirit.
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Throughout history, the lives of ordinary folk have fascinated artists. ALICE GUILLERMO traces the development of genre paintings in the Philippines. from Spanish era to contemporary times.
Image: Norma Belleza’s “Market Vendors”, Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
Courtesy of the Artist
READ MOREThrough the many shifts and turns in Philippine art and the unceasing pursuit for new styles and expressions in the past decade, genre painting has remained a staple in Philippine art. It has, moreover, the longest history in local art and has included a multitude of forms and idioms. Genre paintings depict scenes of everyday life, moments frozen in time that speak of a culture and ordinary people’s lives.
Historically, the first genre appeared in the 19th century with the secularization of art. The Spanish king had just opened the ports of Manila to foreign trade and freed art from ecclesiastical control to give way to the vaster interests of artists and the representation of the world. Before this, painters and sculptors were occupied with representing the Catholic divinity—Jesus Christ, the Holy Family, Mother Mary, and a host of saints.
With newfound freedom to produce as they pleased, artists turned to more earthbound subjects and to the world around them. At first, there was the vogue for portraits, as the walls of the bahay na bato (traditional stone house) proudly proclaimed the identities of the owners, the new elite, clothed in their Sunday finery, to serve as models for succeeding generations. Th en genre paintings followed suit to portray in turn the activities of the people and the progress they made in the century.
Perhaps, some of the earliest genre works were done by Simon Flores y de la Rosa who was one of the artists of exquisite portraits in the miniaturist style. In his well-known genre work, “Las Primeras Letras”, a mother teaches her small daughter to read. Within the setting of a modest bamboo hut, their physical closeness conveys the gentle and intimate transmission of knowledge from one generation to another. Moreover, the theme of literacy was indeed a progressive one in the period of the transition from Spanish to American rule. Painted in the late 19th century, it was a work of vision and promise.
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Joey de Leon likes his collection to tell stories, and his favorite ones are those that harbor an irreverent streak, if not secret codes known only to him and the artist. And if his walls say one thing about him, it’s that mischief might as well be his middle name
TEXT BY TARA FT SERING PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICKY SERING
Image: Detail of "Christ" by Onib Olmedo & Joey de Leon, 1984, mixed media on paper, 9 x 11 inches
Some collectors, if not most, suffer an ironic situation because of their nature: the sheer size of their collections make it impossible for them to see the bulk of their acquisitions as often as they’d like. The artworks they collect spend years in storage and emerge only as entries in tracking files.
And then there are collectors who live among their collections, which are built so closely around their lives, reflecting not just their extraordinary buying prowess but likewise the story of how they live.
Among the latter is Joey de Leon, comedian, actor, producer, writer, painter and collector. Known primarily as one-third of the most famous trio on Philippine television (along with the brothers Tito and Vic Sotto), as iconic as the Three Stooges, he is widely acknowledged as one among the primary geniuses that have shaped pop culture. His influence has spanned generations, beginning in the late 1970s, when he and the Sotto brothers began hosting Eat, Bulaga!, a noontime variety show that would later become the longest running show on Philippine television.
De Leon has written hundreds of songs and movies, both for himself and other artists, most of which have seeped into the mainstream consciousness and defined certain eras. Songs penned in the Seventies and early Eighties are remembered by fortysomethings with a bit of nostalgia, and a barrage of movies in the Eighties to the Nineties, marked by unbridled irreverence and winking allusions to contemporary life, still trigger laughing fits in those who had seen them. Not bad for a self-confessed unruly problem student with a red-splotched report card who managed to sail on to graduation on the wings of creativity and charm (one of his teachers thought he had a striking resemblance to British child star, Mark Lester). To this day, Iskul Bukol, a TV series that starred de Leon and his posse as a cadre of mischievous problem students who were too cool for school, lives on as part of the local lexicon to mean a class of rowdy, all-play-no-work students.
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BACKFor Annie Cabigting, the completion of a painting is only the beginning of art.
TEXT BY KRISTINE FONACIER PHOTOGRAPHS BY LILEN UY
Annie Cabigting likes conversations, and fortunately for her, her new space affords plenty of opportunities for them. Her new studio-slash-living-space is a recently converted floor in an old warehouse complex that has turned into a compound for all sorts of creative types: in the neighboring buildings are graphic designer Marcus Nada and surf-skate house Fluidsurf; in the building below is visual artist Maggy Obana, and right next door is architect Michaela Benedicto. They’ve taken to the habit of congregating by the steps outside the building every afternoon to trade notes. “Ah, if these steps could talk, what stories they’d tell!” Cabigting laughs.
She loves these convivial afternoons, and loves the conversations with her fellow artists. Cabigting is devilishly good at it, too, a subtle maestro of introductions and connections. She is good at forging connections between her friends, introducing one to another by identifying shared interests; she likes introducing new avenues for discussion, encourages everyone to take a turn, knows when to assert herself and when to quietly draw back to watch from the sidelines. She has a healthy streak of mischief, too: she takes an impish glee in asking the uncomfortable question (point-blank: “Are you still together with so-and-so?”), for drawing attention to the things the rest have been tiptoeing around.
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BACKMarcel Antonio's Sturm und Drang takes inspiration from a world of literary greats.
BY REUBEN RAMAS CAÑETE
Image: Detail of "A Mad Gleam", 2008, Oil on canvas, 48x48 inches
Courtesy of Imelda Uy
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Marcel Antonio is a firm believer of the possibilities of traditional allegories and metaphors in addressing contemporary issues and themes. A scion of artistic parents (both father Angelito Antonio and mother Norma Belleza are famed Filipino Figurative Expressionists who came of age in the Sixties), the younger Antonio grew up in a household where aesthetic debates and art flowed easily from the crib to the living room sofa. Antonio’s fine arts education at the esteemed University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman also furthered his intellectual curiosity by interlinking avant-garde conceptual theories with more traditional genre painting practices. This bore fruit starting in the 1990s with his distinctive paintings of lovers and interiors suffused with the alienation and alterity of the modern everyday.
Having as his artistic forebears the London school of Expressionists, such as Francis Bacon and Ron B. Kitaj, Marcel Antonio looks at the impact that culture has made on contemporary human life, and how the act of storytelling in paint transforms human existence into a weighty transgression with mythology and history. In Sturm und Drang, Antonio’s most recent series of paintings dwell on this ability of telling stories that contain double meanings, hidden clues, and multiple interpretations. Using as his source of inspiration the classic tradition of English literature, in particular the plays of William Shakespeare or the novels of Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, Antonio imbues his paintings with a dense set of multiple signifiers that play upon his long-standing interest in semiotics—the science of signs. Antonio’s ability to artistically interpret and redirect the meanings of these stories is aimed at addressing contemporary audiences with the drama of the original text. This strategy also allows Antonio to add or conflate different levels of interpretation to these stories based on his ability to play off and re-identify the actors of this textual but now painted stage, which are, after all, metaphors for a more general human condition.
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BACKFour October exhibits give new meaning to group dynamics
BY ABBY YAO
Image: Franklyn Epil’s “Si Lola Basyang at Ang Kanyang Irog” featured in [?], Metro Gallery’s 18th anniversary show
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From overwhelming assemblies of small artworks to confusing collections in various media, group exhibits can be a challenge for curators. Fortunately, the recent crop of group shows at the Paseo,Kaida, Metro and Tin-aw galleries did not offer such extremes. The limits given to the artists helped prevent a slapdash hodgepodge of styles, materials and techniques. The results are exhibits that are manageable for viewers, artists, curators and gallerists alike.
Reviews of:
- Paseo Gallery’s Figuration Now at Art Center (October 12 to 27)
- Urban Icons at Kaida Gallery (October 18 to November 7)
- [?] at Metro Gallery (Metro Gallery’s 18th anniversary show, October 12 to 21)
- Litanya at Tin-aw Gallery (October 23 to November 6)
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BACKA four-year-old museum in the heart of Metro Manila’s major business district is guided by a mission to make people look at art, and to truly see how it figures in our lives
TEXT BY TARA FT SERING PHOTOGRAPHS BY STAN ONG
While mobs form snaking lines every day outside the Centre Pompidou or the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, and droves of visitors have to be guided out of the New York’s MoMA and Metropolitan Museum at closing time, Metro Manila’s museums are hard-pressed for an audience. For most of the year, with the exception of by-invitation exhibit openings and school field trips, the art spaces are cold and quiet but for the hum of central air-conditioning and the echoing footsteps of a solitary guard patrolling the empty chambers.
It’s just the sort of humdrum museum life curators of Metro Manila’s museums hope will soon change, and the Yuchengco Museum is one among several privately owned public art spaces that share a singular aspiration—that is, to cultivate the same museum-going culture that thrives in most of the world’s art capitals, where exhibit openings are anticipated with almost the same fervor, if not more, as blockbuster films.
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BACKIn the shadow of Taipei 101, an enduring art fair faces up to the odds stacked against it and emerges the big winner
Image: A group of Japanese artists work on a mural throughout the five days of the art fair.
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Art Taipei 2009 opened to much fanfare at the sprawling Taipei World Trade Center, in the shadow of Taipei 101, the world’s tallest occupied building to date. Seventy-eight exhibitors from 10 countries around the world, including 16 galleries that were participating for the first time, welcomed a large crowd of art enthusiasts and buyers, and the number of visitors that streamed in steadily across the five days of the art fair, from August 28 to September 1, reached a whopping 10,000. To have art appreciated at this level of enthusiasm already marks the art fair a big success, but more stories of triumph may be uncovered in the run-up to the event.
Organizers of Art Taipei 2009 knew they were in for a massive challenge at the earliest stages of planning. The global credit crunch, which broke out in late 2008, was still wreaking havoc on vital economies across the globe, and with the exception of a handful of success stories, adversely impacted the art market. A number of art fairs, lamentably shrunken in size, cited the recession as the main reason for the slowdown. Not spared from the effects of the recession, Art Taipei may have opened with less exhibitors than it had in 2008, but the seasoned team behind Asia’s longest continuously running art fair came armed with an impressive contingency plan.
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BACKWhite Wall presents a preview to the exhibit curated by RAMON ES LERMA
*In the Eye of Modernity, Philippine Neo-Realist Masterworks from the Ateneo Art Gallery will be on exhibit at the Singapore Art Museum, 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore, from November 14, 2009 to March 14, 2010.
Image: Detail of Jose Joya’s “Granadean Arabesque”, 1958, 118 x 305 cm, Oil on canvas
— from the catalogue notes by Ramon ES Lerma
In the Eye of Modernity is about digression and direction, giving local audiences a sense of this period in Philippine art that broke with the past and set the tone for the future. Emphasis is given to the Neo-Realists, a “loose-knit group [that was] more a fraternity than a school of thought,” bound by their restless and experimental credo, who converged at the first commercial gallery dedicated to modern art, the Philippine Art Gallery (PAG).
Fernando Zobel, a scion of one of the country’s wealthiest families, participated in many of the exhibitions and discussions at the PAG. He formed friendships with his peers, and became one of their most important patrons. In 1960, Zobel decided to move permanently to Spain. He donated his art collection, which included many important works by the Neo-Realists, to the Ateneo de Manila University where he had taught courses in art appreciation. The move led to the establishment of the Ateneo Art Gallery as the country’s first museum of modern Philippine art.
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© Contemporary Art Philippines 2010
