The Triumph of Form
The Triumph of Form
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, February 26, 1989
(Second in a series)
DESPITE its relative inaccessibility, our sculpture is alive and well, and thriving in the hands of the “old” and unlikely. If you don’t believe me, go and see the invigorating exhibition “Seven Sculptors” at the far-flung Kulay-Diwa Art Galleries in Sucat, Parañaque. If the 15-kilometer trek through south suburbia doesn’t smother you, the sheer recognition of our sculptural potential should be worth the effort.
Every major concern, every contemporary sculptural medium is represented here: wood (Napoleon Abueva Jr.), stone (Pablo Mahinay), metal (Honrado Fernandez), glass (Impy Pilapil), clay in cast resin (Jun Vicaldo), the “indigenous” and the installational (Willy Gonzales and Genara Banzon). Indeed, the 26-year-old curator Sid Hildawa Jr. has successfully assembled a merry mix that does not confuse, pontificate or bore.
On exhibit are not only diverse styles and approaches to sculpturemaking, but the hierarchical ladder from the top rung down. Without pretending to be a comprehensive overview, the show succeeds precisely because of its candor, its breadth and energy.
Los Baños mainstay Genara Banzon shows the stuff that makes her, I believe, the most inventive, the most engaging installational specialist in the country. Within the stifling confines of Kulay-Diwa’s notorious “black gallery” - a problematic space that has overwhelmed its share of artists in the past - Ms. Banzon inhabits the darkness with luminous specks of white that convey a twilight of the soul in transit, a void measured only by scattered traces of her own late father’s mortality.
Impy Pilapil is a sorceress in glass: alluring, luscious, almost vengefully inspired. Unlike Ramon Orlina’s chunky kryptonite slabs (“Lex Luthor would kill to own them”), Pilapil’s elegant, distinctly-oriental transparent panes seduce the viewer with graphic intonations that reverberate with a sensuous pulse - rhythmic, vital, insistent - meditative and passionately searing at once. These are triumphant works, immensely and magnificently evolved from the artist’s clumsy, spray-painted, plate-metal wafers of some years ago, emerging now like the proverbial butterfly from the worm.
Pablo Mahinay’s work deviates ever so slightly from natural forms that they sometimes appear to be unaltered monoliths that have miraculously sprung from the weathering earth. Although not entirely convincing, Mahinay belies the claim that the art of the stone-carver is impotent, cold and unfeeling, infusing his own hefty pieces with the nuances of sensation that demand exploration by touch.
The very young Jun Vicaldo’s anatomical and gestural figurations are best seen collectively, propelled into a kind of lyrical animation by their own freezedried energies like a dance of speared fish before the furnace. Both Newton and Darwin, perhaps even Freud himself, would have liked them. I personally did not; although I very much admired the artist’s obvious potential and his brave devotion to an almost embarrassing nudity.
Neo-ethnic sculptor Willie Gonzales is not unfamiliar to readers of this section, and the very uniqueness of his medium makes his fired and wrap-jointed rattan pieces noteworthy.
I have been more than a little wary of “brainy” architects since the fall of conceptual art and its recourse to alcoholic dementia; but UP Prof. Honrado Fernandez has his head firmly rooted in otherwise-elementary planar dynamics that are delightfully clever, at times transcendental, but always rational. Fernandez works with space, form and projection like you and I breathe, his welded iron grids appearing almost viscous in their plasticity. Literally bending the air with the use of referential touchpoints that are not unlike computer-generated soundings, his filigreed metal screens swirl and undulate with amazing grace and buoyancy.
National Artist Billy Abueva is forever the master of his idiom as builder, as carver, as seen His riveted and ribbed constructions (the outstanding “Fredesvinda” and the mystical “Diamond Jubilee” in particular) are like breathing diaphragms or the hulls of medieval ships in turn, changing metaphors with the smallest variation of his eye and mind in close conjunction.
A floorpiece of heavy Philippine mahogany entitled “Joints to Remember” involves us not only in restive, calculated volume, but in a network of surface detail that weaves the perceived and the intuited like clasped fingers. There is little to dislike in Abueva at all - be it here or elsewhere - and this has led to much ignorant talk about his “mellowing with age” (a derisive assessment of any great artist if ever I heard one). Perhaps it is because we have come to confuse wizardry and daring with bad manners in recent times, thinking them to be one and the same. And, in truth, Mr. Abueva singes the hairs of the intellect without subjecting us to the willful abuse of artistic license.
As I myself exited through Sucat Road, that well-known landmark “Castrillo’s Pieta” (a.k.a. “Castrillo in the Boneyard”) reminded me of the terminal condition of so much in Philippine sculpture. That was a nice touch for a classic sunset ending. Ed Castrillo’s monumental edifice may have sold more plots in Loyola than you and I would care to count. But it was the spirited little exhibit at Kulay-Diwa that rekindled my belief in an afterlife.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “The Triumph of Form” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, February 26, 1989
