In Praise of Young Art

By Cesare A.X. Syjuco, Jean Marie Syjuco

Published in: The Sunday Times Magazine, May 17, 1987

As Grand Prize winners in a recent on-the-spot painting competition sponsored by the Department of Foreign Affairs, five very young artists have been plucked from obscurity and gifted with the rare opportunity to represent the Philippines in the forthcoming Asean Youth Painting Exhibition and Workshop in Singapore this June. Barely in the prime of life, and hardly out of the shadow of the academe, they have emerged suddenly in the public eye, not a little dazzled by the onrush of current events.

Orville Tiamson, Sid Hildawa, Gerardo Merino, Jeho Bitancor and Jesus Medina may not be household names as yet, but fate has virtually singled them out for some degree of prominence in the future - owing, at least in part, to this auspicious landmark encountered so early in their careers.

Probably by design, the rich diversity of their individual styles and backgrounds is genuinely representative of the art and culture of our country. An ecclectic weave of varied hues and persuasions that follow the calling of different gods, our own creative milieu is a casestudy in synchronized conflict. Our Realism has come full-circle, even as our Abstraction shows signs of stirring from a long and languid sleep. We have artworks of uncompromising celerablity and space-age wizardry, even as most of our artists continue to battle illusion from the palette. Our galleries peddle our paintings like expensive rice-cakes, even as our walls are constantly ravaged in avant-garde gestures of outrage. And our art hangs in the jaded museums of the West, even as far too many of our painters must struggle to meet the rising cost of materials.

Truly, past, present and future converge in a heady, unholy alliance that is the spirit of our contemporary art and artistry. And this ASEAN Selection manages to say it all.

Orville Tiamson, 23 years old, graduated from the University of Santo Tomas in 1985 with a Fine Arts Degree. His outstanding mixed media constructions - meticulously built on an electrifying backdrop of cascading primary colors - are distinctly modern in feel, rooted in implied narrative and the popular image. His arbitrary use of 3-dimensional objects, magazine clippings, and sundry other items, owes some allegiance to the selective scavenging of American Pop Art, but his terse choice of subject-matter betrays a deep, underlying concern for the recent events of our time. The saga of Ferdinand and Imelda, of corruption and violence, of exploitation and revolt, are the elements that compel his creativity. The addition of new parameters to the overworked genre of Socio-Political painting is a most welcome development in itself.

There is no simple way to describe the work of Sid Hildawa, a self-taught artist who is an architect by profession. At 24, he is an accomplished sculptor as well as a painter, his educational background in structural dynamics serving him in good stead through works that attempt radical departures from the conventional picture-plane. This artist often prefers to present his work in direct relation to its surroundings, exploring time and space in a stroboscopic continuum, or building beyond the painting's surface with hinged panels that hang obliquely from their original points of origin. His recent work, in particular, is representative of a new wave in local Abstraction that has yet to develop into its full potential, but which, in time, may yet restore the public's interest in non-representational art.

Gerardo Merino is still another abstractionist of considerable inventiveness and sound compositional sense. His Fiber Art paintings are handpainted and stitched, exploring not only the nuances of form and color, but the inherent sensuality of textile, thread and weave. This artist’s tentative probes into a third dimension are probably what will ultimately distinguish his work from those of other notable textile workers like Pacita Abad and Manuel Rodriguez, Jr. This early, he appears adventurous enough to make the break with his better-known predecessors, and at 24 years of age, his process-oriented training from the Philippine Women’s University should fuel his innate lyricism to the breaking of new ground.

At 19, Jeho Bitancor is the youngest of the ASEAN Five, and possibly the least preoccupied with new processes and techniques. His liberal training as a Fine Arts student from the University of the Philippines will very likely serve to encourage him in the further pursuit of his own personal mythology. Already, his current work is far more compelling than other artists his age, a haunting interplay of poetic symbolism with an emerging vocabulary of its own.

Jesus Medina displays a stylistic ambivalence that was once generally frowned upon, but which is now rapidly becoming the norm. A product of the University of Santo Tomas, his is a polymorphous talent that works in a wide range of concerns and media, from muted rustic watercolors to subliminal imagery engorged in a heavy, molded impasto. At 25, Medina is the kind of fleetfooted artist whose ultimate destination is impossible to predict, but whose open-ended investigations are a delight in themselves. His exploratory work with indigenous materials, bonded and glazed with a glossy industrial finish, should raise its share of eyebrows from here to Singapore.

Many of us cannot begin to appreciate the importance of such “artistic expeditions” abroad—particularly to the development of our creative resources. By sending a small selection of our young talents overseas, we not only broaden the horizons of these chosen few, but likewise enrich ourselves with the wealth of knowledge that they bring back with them. It is good to remember that in the olden days, mothers would send their sons off in search of fortune, hoping that they would eventually return to share whatever wealth they had found with their less fortunate kinsmen. Often, these sons would return only with stories of faraway places and the songs that they had learned there. Not treasures of gold and silver, they were treasures of the heart. But they were treasures just the same.

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ART LAB: The Syjuco Museum