The Past in Present-tense
The Past in Present-tense
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, April 11, 1987
SOMEWHERE along the way, a very serious break took place in the development of classical painting, stopping it dead in its tracks and causing it to fragment into a multiplicity of directions. Many people like to blame this dramatic shift in attitudes on the advent of photography, and perhaps they are right. But be that as it may and for whatever reason, the documentational functions of painting — which for centuries had been its very foundation and its reason for being — had suddenly ceased to be of any vital importance within the realm of the developmental. With the new medium of photography to record objective reality, painting was free to explore itself. It had therefore shunned "purpose" and had become infatuated with "being". This ultimately signalled the end of classical painting, and marked the beginning of modern art.
That, in a nutshell, is what actually happened. But the implications and the attendant controversy were awesome indeed! To some extent, the debate still rages between classical and modern, and it is largely because of this that the art critic was to find himself a permanent niche in society.
It is no less difficult to draw the line in an exhibit like Claude Tayag’s "KRISTOS", currently on view at the San Agustin Museum in Intramuros. In the first place, so much is attempted and yet so little actually transpires. The artist has faithfully rendered (in small and medium-scale watercolors) a virtual glossary of religious figuration copied outright from diverse local sources. While Tayag’s approach is clearly documentational, his obsessive concern with his subject of choice infuses his work with a delectable mentalism commonly associated with work of an exploratory nature. This "introspection" of objective reality acquits his rather simplistic premise with a lucidity that addresses itself to the intellect, even as it claims a one-to-one correspondence with an external point of reference.
This kind of talk can be tediously boring. Again, in simplified terms, I did not find Tayag’s latest works to be as visually engaging as I had come to expect from the fanfare accompanying the exhibit. What I did find fascinating, however, was the artist’s own singleminded determination to record (and personally explore) the relatively inflexible iconography of freestanding folk-religious figuration in austere twodimensional terms, deliberately limiting himself to the variation of subject and point of view in an impassioned confrontation with a model dispassionately rendered.
Claude Tayag is either a classicist with a 20th century intellect, or a modernist with a yen for the classical. His "Kristos" exemplify the kind of work that taunts us with the realization of how far we’ve gone to get to where we started.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “The Past in Present-tense” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, April 11, 1987
