A Master’s Gift in Fragments of The Proletarian Jeepney
A Master’s Gift in Fragments of The Proletarian Jeepney
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, December 21, 1988
(Second of two parts)
'Pamana' will neither support nor invalidate any claims to greatness that continue to be made by legions on behalf of Cesar Legaspi. History will be his judge.
BECAUSE it is entitled "Pamana" (meaning "heritage" or "inheritance"), the Metropolitan Museum exhibit of Cesar Legaspi’s recent paintings until January should be considered an important outing for the artist — regardless of its modest size. The exhibition notes state explicitly that the 71-year-old Legaspi, now widely regarded as the premiere visual artist in the land, has painted this small thematic collection as a gift he is leaving to his children — and by association at least, to all of us, his art progeny.
Viewed in this light, the artist's choice of subject matter — the eccentric mode of public conveyance known throughout the civilized world as the Philippine Jeepney — lends itself nicely to both his professed purpose and his alltoo-familiar stylistic devices. So well, in fact, that one might wonder why he has bothered to paint anything else in recent years.
Legaspi’s stringent Cubism — dissecting both form and essence in a rigorous re-ordering of vision by its fractured pictorial components — is a veritable kaleidoscope of visual fragments in space and time, each viewed from an assortment of simultaneously-rendered perspectives. The components in this case are not so much linked as they are interwoven, and the resulting prismatic mesh literally pulsates with the Jeepney’s immensely-rich and brash iconography.
Men and their machines are inextricably joined, not only as road-gladiators bonded to their iron cockpits in a resolute pact with machismo, power-objects and slow toxic death (as in "Pajo! Pajo!", "Turning Point" and the outstanding "Peace"), but also with pseudoscifi satirical wit that has flesh and bodywork breeding prototypes for some future tribe of fanciful Jeepney-humanoids. This is so in the curiously-naif "Self-Image," an otherwise minor mixed-media work founded on the union of Leger and the Ysmael Steel Robot, Reddy Kilowatt and Banzai Bubblegum. (Here too, Legaspi, while true to the down-home humor of his milieu, paints a picture exceedingly rare for this heroic painter because it is so uncharacteracteristically juvenile: the folk-robotics of space-age human hardware, Tokyo Towen in concept, and rebuilt and refashioned in Pandacan, Metro Manila, in the manner of Sarao and Regal Films.)
Legaspi’s best-known recurring themes fit hand-in-glove with the bustling world of the working-class commuter amid his painted plate-metal steeds. The artist’s patented proletarian parade of "kapit-bisig" figures, pressed shoulder to shoulder in a stroboscopic ballet of anatomical tension, is an eminently suitable image for the labor, commerce and industry that relentlessly ply our congested thoroughfares in “Mad Hour", a sizeable oil painting that appears more enthusiastic than delirious, more rousing than confused or agitated as its title implies. "Tropical Baroque" and the less-ambitious "Mga Halimaw Ng Lunsod" (title preferred in the Met translation) both border rational abstraction in their hivelike cellular configurations, with the representational fragments less easily comprehensible and more isolated from a gravitational core than the accompanying pieces in the show. If anything, these works demonstrate Cubism’s inherent fascination with decorative motifs, graphic detail and the poetic potential of the mundane, with the Jeepney's lush trimmings (popularly known as "borloloy") being an inexhaustible goldmine for the dissectional genre.
The poet in Cesar Legaspi, so long hidden under a bushel and therefore so undeservedly ignored, again shows signs of stirring in his blending of mythological and contemporary images. Exceedingly more literary than his arbitrarily-cropped lettristic elements (another throw-back to a typical Cubist predilection that profits from our text-heavy roadside sources via directional signs, billboards and talismanic slogans) are such clever juxtapositions of modern and archaic types — most notably in his metaphorical allusions to the mythical Malakas at Maganda as driver and Jeepney, primal man and muse.
Still and all, the question will persist in the minds of a few, not all of whom are entirely ignorant of Legaspi’s exhaustive life’s work and the enviable context in which it is now situated. Is Cesar Legaspi a truly important (vis-a-vis potentially great) Filipino art master? One, at any rate, deserving of veneration and the vigorous "investment buying" that will almost certainly attend his closing years? Personally, I have grown up thinking so as a matter of faith, and have never found enough reason to doubt it.
But the pocket-exhibit "Pamana", given its modest size and almost-spurty sentimental flavoring, will neither support nor invalidate any claims to greatness that continue to be made on the artist’s behalf by his legion of friends, patrons and admirers. History is the great man’s undoing at every turn, and evasive as it may sound, it is history that will be Cesar Legaspi’s judge. Not the history of pulp-paper critics, artworld hacks and dealers, but the history that time alone can write. Know, then, that time has always been kind to Cesar Legaspi. And that time will likely remain his staunchest ally.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “A Master’s Gift in Fragments of The Proletarian Jeepney” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, December 21, 1988
