From Rattan to Oils A Potentiality Reaffirmed
From Rattan to Oils
A Potentiality Reaffirmed
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, August 27, 1988
PINAGLABANAN Galleries' all-sculpture exhibit "Objects & Spaces" - a thematic extravaganza that opened to a capacity crowd in January of 1986 - was a classic case of potential gone awry. Conceived and organized by the volatile Roberto Chabet, it suddenly found itself without a curator when the diminutive fire-ball resigned his position in a huff. Management of the exhibit was then offered to the late Ray Albano, who incidentally, had succeeded the luckless Chabet as CCP's resident curator over a decade earlier. Albano accepted the job with enthusiasm - only to be felled by a massive heart attack shortly thereafter.
Determined to proceed with the exhibit as planned, the owners of Pinaglabanan then approached Virginia "Ginny" Dandan, a teacher-cum-provocateaur at the UP College of Fine Arts whose field of specialization included sculpture, and who had some experience as curator of the Vargas Museum. She immediately went to work on this half-cocked spectacle that was scheduled to open only weeks later. Perhaps because she needed desperately to salvage a derelict show at short notice, Dandan traded quality for quantity, injecting hitherto-unknown talents into the original cast of established veterans, and unveiling a mammoth exhibit literally bursting at the seams with inconsequential rubbish. As the coup-de-gras to "Objects & Spaces," its month-long appearance at Pinaglabanan was largely re-empted by the People's Power "revolution" of February 1986.
I mention recent history here because it was at the ill-starred "Objects & Spaces" exhibit that I first encountered the work of visual artist Willie Gonzales. Then 26 years old and an undergraduate at the UP, he had been thrust rather prematurely in the public eye as one of Dandan's bright young saplings. Nonetheless, I found his wall-bound outdoor installation a great deal more intriguing than most of the garden-pieces that peppered Pinag-labanan's lawn, a striking figuralive composite hewn spon-taneously from supple rattan. While young Gonzales' potential as an experimental sculptor was obvious in itself, it was the potential of the material he had inherited from Dandan - the torched and twisted cane at once indigenous and other-worldly - that filled me with excitement and anticipation for the many possibilities it proferred in the artist's hands.
Other than his lacklustre participation in the CCP's inter-university exhibit Young Art" barely a month later, nothing more was seen or heard from Willie Gonzales. And so it was with considerable joy that I responded to an invitation announcing his first comprehensive one-man show, currently on exhibitat the sprawling Kulay-Diwa Galleries in Parañaque until mid-September.
To my surprise and ultimate disappointment, Gonzales has all but forsaken both sculpture and rattan for conventional oil paintings in the trendy neo-expressionist manner - seemingly falling prey to the onslaught of marketable western influences that have swept his alma mater like a plague in recent years. While still essentially figurative, his professedly autobiographical canvases lack the verve, the novelty, the freshness of approach that characterized his earlier work in three dimensions. And as is sadly the case with many of his contemporaries at the state university, Gonzales' new swirling brushwork is competent enough, but hardly significant enough to merit critical attention at length.
It is, rather, the artist's barely surviving sculptural concerns (though much too few and far between in this current outing to really matter) that continue to arouse our interest and faith. To be sure, Gonzales' now-predominantly abstract meanderings in familiar rattan, otherwise barely evolved from his Pinaglabanan debut of three years ago, are relegated to minor roles in the gallery almost like an afterthought. But viewed alongside his paintings, they offer still other exciting possibilities as canvas and sculpture in tandem.
Objectively speaking, Willie Gonzales continues to be a promise largely unfulfilled, much like the "Objects & Spaces" exhibit that introduced him to the world. And then again, even a potentiality reaffirmed remains intact in the realm of the possible.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “From Rattan to Oils A Potentiality Reaffirmed” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, August 27, 1988
