Beyond A Coming of Age
Beyond A Coming of Age
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, August 31, 1988
THE innovative use of materials, and not socio-political commitment, was Imelda Cajipe-Endaya's eventual passkey to the big league. Her earlier work in conventional oils and prints were never really noteworthy on their own — except perhaps for the fact that they now exist in retrospect as eloquent records of her long-abiding concern for Pinoy themes. For the most part, the younger Meps Endaya lacked brilliance, energy, and a place in the sun. Imaginative imagery was not her forte, and her all-too-deliberate figuration was limited mostly to visual clichés and the classical distribution of staid pictorial elements into sections or planar "pocket." She was not nearly equipped for the role of a visual arts virtuoso, and her career until recently was at best lacklustre and plodding.
Symbolism was perhaps her strongest point, an almost poetic sense of cross-referenced interfacing effecting visual narratives in virtual pantomime. This augured well enough for a message-artist like Endaya, and for a time was her one distinctive facet. What she sorely needed was the ideal vehicle to translate her otherwise-blunt and languid imagery into effective and engaging works of art. And despite her excursions into a brighter palette, much of her conventional produce appeared bland, lackadaisical and uninspired.
Her discovery of assemblage and its wholesale assimilation into large-scale painting was a personal breakthrough of immeasurable significance. Conjuring elaborate scenarios both suggested and counterpointed by a dense underlay of petrified fabrics, coarse native weaves and other texture-rich readymades, the artist arrived at a manner of painting both heroic and singular. In this context, even her elementary skill with the brush assumed a compelling lyricism and power that had previously eluded her, the cascading melange of surface qualities providing her not only with the means with which to enthrall the viewer, but also to galvanize her usually-static, fragment ed images into a masterfully integrated whole.
It was this very innovation as well — supported by our people's long tradition with crafts and the recycling of cultural debris — that raised Endaya's work above those of her contemporaries in the embattled Social Realist genre. And with her penchant for homegrown symbols and almost-tediously painstaking detail, her large, pulsating canvases of late continue to provide a viable alternative to the visual sloganeering of an art movement honed on propaganda and political bickering.
"Western art has nowhere to go," was Meps Endaya's memorable statement in Alfred Yuson's landmark documentary on Nine Filipina Visual Artists. Still and all, one cannot help wondering what the future may have in store for her, with the artist now firmly established at age 39 as one of the country's leading women painters. Already, her current exhibit at the CCP Museum Hallway betrays her characteristic tendency to fall back on formula and tireless reworking. And almost certainly, Imelda Cajipe-Endaya now faces the greatest challenge of her artistic career: that of seeking fresh inroads beyond her coming of age.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Beyond A Coming of Age” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, August 31, 1988
