CCP’s Thirteen Artists: Are These Eight Enough?
CCP’s Thirteen Artists:
Are These Eight Enough?
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, March 12, 1988
AT the CCP Main Gallery for a staggering three uninterrupted months until May 2, is the much-publicized “13 Artists” exhibit, featuring selected works by this year’s recipients of a rejuvenated incentive program that had become widely discredited as a petty political exercise during the waning years of the Marcos regime.
There are many reasons why everyone even remotely concerned about the plight of the visual arts in this country should see this show. Foremost is the genuine need for the paying public to assess both the conduct and the outcome of this rather costly project at first hand, particularly in the light of CCP’s unprecedented influence over a local artworld already hard-hit by the changing of the guard.
For openers, there are only eight awardees instead of thirteen, raising serious doubts about CCP’s professed belief in the potential and worth of its own captive constituency. This year’s “annointed eight” are Popo San Pascual and Pardo de Leon, Roberto Feleo, Jose Tence Ruiz, Gerardo Tan, Agnes Arellano, Dan Raralio and Peter de Guzman. Six of them are recent products of the UP; one is a product of PWU, and still another is from UST. All hail from Metro Manila, and none can be said to have emerged from humble origins.
Probably the best known of Pinaglabanan Galleries’ youthful "discoveries,” Popo San Pascual and Pardo de Leon are hardly strangers to us, being full-blown products of determined gallery and media fanfare. Popo is as close to being a prodigy as one can get, being already a grizzled veteran in his early 20s. I remember seeing his work at the AAP Annual Competition some six or seven years ago, and being absolutely charmed by his naivete and gargantuan sense of scale.
In the years since then, however, San Pascual has gone from simplistic, child-like visionary to trendy art-market marionette and chic cosmopolitan dream merchant, a mouthful of undercover developments that continue to imperil him to this very day. For the record, I wish to say that I still fear for Popo’s frail integrity even as I salute his remarkable young talent. Cast into the limelight at a tender age, he may yet have to pay the piper his pound of flesh.
However inconsistent this may seem, Ruiz’s diverse talents are inscrutable, and those who think his drawings nice should also see his amazing upright constructions filled to capacity with a riot of images, colors and textures. It is almost unfortunate that he is now better known as an editorial cartoonist.
Gerardo Tan is definitely among the most intriguing local proponents of the New Abstraction, a nondescript painter whose no-holds-barred approach to art-making sometimes yields works of astounding astuteness, energy and daring. A surprise winner in the recently concluded Bangladesh Biennial, his many years as an exhibiting artist were generally confined to fraternal outings with other graduates, a symbiotic relationship he maintained which both nurtured and stunted his artistic development. Perhaps this latest distinction will encourage Gerry to strike out on his own, something he should have done a long time ago.
Agnes Arellano has probably spent more time, effort and money to advance her career and art world influence than anyone else I know, and this — possibly her first major award — is well-deserved. Although somewhat displaced in this youthful company at 38 years of age, and billed in the local media as an "internationally-renowned artist,” she is a sculptor who bears close watching if only for her acute investigative knack and the wealth of material possibilities at her immediate disposal. Owner of the prestigious Pinaglabanan Galleries, Agnes now makes her own bid for individual stardom, and is undoubtedly at her best when she isn’t trying to relate, to scandalize or to impress.
Still another Pinaglabanan fixture, sculptor Dan Raralio now displays a compulsion to cast his robust torsos in fanciful painterly backdrops that are as cold and hefty as the tersely-cropped reliefs for which he is best known. But Raralio’s new paintings suffer from precisely the same lack of buoyancy that sinks many of his cumbersome sculptural pieces, looking very much like a ton of pre-fabricated concrete with the spontaneity of a sphinx. In fact, it is difficult to ascertain at this point just what the future holds for Raralio, and his priorities will probably require a lot of sorting out.
The least known of the eight awardees is Peter de Guzman, whose debt to classical monumentality is obvious. Strangely enough, while this young sculptor is probably the most inexperienced of the lot, he appears to be the most set in his ways, even as he typifies the kind of fresh new talent that CCP should have singled out for this program.
A great many questions persist and will probably remain unanswered. Is the bulk of our creative potential really confined to an urban elite? Has CCP really exhausted every possible means to seek out promising new talent from all over the country? If so, were there none to be found? Why only eight awardees when there was money enough to have "motivated” thirteen? And why spend the people’s dwindling resources to call our attention to veteran artists who need no further introduction?
Is it not CCP’s job to seek and promote talent outside the confines of its own hallowed halls? Are not the majority of these artists culled from the old roster of Imelda’s CCP? What then is the difference between the old CCP and its new, enlightened counterpart? Just how new is the Cultural Center of the Philippines and its corps of enforcers?
Agnes Arellano had a favorite word during her activist days with the ill-starred VAC group, of which I was proudly a part. The word was “vigilance.” And the vigil wears on into the long night.
I used to think that Pardo “Bubbles” de Leon was a Pop Art straggler pointlessly fascinated with checker-board optics and bursting Florentine bosoms. But in this, her latest appearance at the CCP, she paints like an angel obsessed, deftly orchestrating the most viscous colors with an impasto that would shame La Aunor’s birthday cake. De Leon’s paintings now look as delectable as she does, which in gallery parlance, is two shots in the right direction. Although hatched from the same egg as San Pascual, she is definitely more mature at 28, and the direction she now pursues should be a richer source of original imagery for her talented brushwork.
Distinguishing himself as the first Metrobank awardee for painting, Roberto Feleo is one of the most contagious influences in Philippine Art today, and his anthropological wit and fascinating indigenous techniques are now as apparent in our art-making as Bencab’s influence was in his day. Almost certainly, Feleo is much too established an artist for this youth-oriented award, and yet all artists must make their way in the world as best they can. Being a survivor of Ray Albano’s later-day stable of CCP regulars, I have no doubt that he is one artist who can thrive just as readily in a hothouse environment.
Jose Tence Ruiz has become so phenomenally successful in recent years that it is easy to forget just how long he has been around. A determined competitor in local art contests since the late ’70s, he had already garnered impressive awards by the time he was rediscovered by Pinaglabanan Galleries in a decidedly lackluster exhibit in 1985.
Generally considered a “concerned artist” who stood against Imelda’s CCP in a concerted boycott of its facilities, he nonetheless made his first appearance there long before the February uprising, and has remained a frequent CCP exhibitor since.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “CCP’s Thirteen Artists: Are These Eight Enough?” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, March 12, 1988
