Divining The Future In Today’s Young Art
Divining The Future In Today’s Young Art
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, May 17, 1986
DEVELOPMENT art, by its very nature, is a divinatory activity, sublime prophecy at its best and clever conjecture in the least. By stabbing willfully at the dark, the artist tests his mettle against the future and thereby perceives beyond himself, beyond the confines of his immediate context and into unchartered ground, treading the thin line between recklessness and intuition. The developmental artist’s realm is the realm of tomorrow, his toil is his children’s harvest, his promise is fulfillment yet to come. Developmental art celebrates potential even as it shuns definition, mocks history, and defies the here and now.
The current exhibition of four very young printmakers at the Finale Art File in Makati provides more than just an interesting glimpse into a generation yet to emerge; it is a pocket-primer on our artistic potential as gleaned from a single summer’s effort by an apparently competent and selfless teacher. Through this exhibit of works by his own workshop students, leading Filipino painter and printmaker Romulo Olazo joins the growing ranks of artist-educators whose respective lesson-plans include actual field experience for their young apprentices—a curious breed of “playing coaches”, as it were, who include Ibarra de la Rosa, Chabet and Joya, Alcuaz and Peque Gallaga.
Because “potential art” and “potential talent” are such reassuring and such reckless themes in themselves, exhibitions of this nature have always fared well enough within the context of the developmental. In almost every case, the would-be instructor rests his own reputation in the balance; his professed initiative in the organization of such exhibits serves as an imprimatur in itself, demanding a discriminating public’s attention with the former’s good name as collateral. The captain literally goes down with his ship, as much in art as in the navy.
To Olazo’s credit, however, the works themselves are impressive enough on their own, displaying an overall level of competence and creative bravado that is most surprising under the circumstances. Timmy Carreon, Dino Ner, Jonathan Olazo and Jojo Serrano are not only debuting artists, they are high school students (!) from the Jose Abad Santos Memorial School (JASMS) where the senior Olazo teaches art as an elective course. Sight unseen, the roving critic in possession of this information might well be excused for taking such an exhibit less than lightly—which would be both tragic and unwarranted in this particular instance.
In very nearly every case, the exhibiting artists’ mastery of means is beyond reproach. The 16-year-old Jonathan Olazo, third prize winner in the recently concluded AAP-Rotary Art Competition, displays a penchant for powerful figuration that is almost disturbing for a boy of his age. His outstanding rubbercut “The Conspiracy” is a thematic work replete with intrigue, guilt and emotional tension reminiscent of the graphic renditions of Edvard Munch. The equally-young Dino Ner, on the other hand, is endowed with an understated sophistication that is rarely seen in abstractionists twice his age, exhibiting rigidly-structured collographs that are surprisingly pristine and delicate in their translation.
Jojo Serrano and Timmy Carreon show tremendous potential as young upstarts, exploring the endless possibilities of line and volume and their re-ordering on a single visual plane. Where Carreon is deliberately venturesome and tentative, Serrano’s rubbercuts are explosively self-contained, charged with deep-seated psychological implications. Carreon’s “Playtime” is a remarkable piece on the line as representationally self-serving, while Serrano’s “Psycho” and his heroic work “The Harvest” are in many ways superior to similar work by the veteran printmaker Nonon Padilla.
While each of the exhibiting artists betrays a sizeable debt to a number of 20th Century masters, from Picasso to Klee to Steinberg, none of them have emerged here as Olazo’s little clones - in itself an important achievement by a most able teacher. Style is very often a later development in an artist’s evolution, and clearly, there will be a tomorrow for the contemporary visual arts in this country.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Divining the future in Today’s Young Art” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, May 17, 1986
