Alexander de los Santos

12 - Authenticity

Contemporary Artists

1. Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan

Husband and wife duo Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan emigrated
to Australia in 2006 – an event which became integral to their artistic
practices. Their work speaks of community, personal experience,
memory, and displacement, alongside the emotional and psychological
affects of migration. The Aquilizans often use culturally-
significant objects as metaphors of the ‘lived experience’. In 2006, they
exhibited Project Belonging: In Transit at the Biennale of Sydney; made
with traditional balikbayan boxes used by Filipinos to ship their
belongings around the world, the installation evoked the couple’s voyage
to Australia. This work evolved into Project Another Country:
Address (2008), made of the contents of 140 balikbayan boxes, each
carefully packed and curated with personal items. The Aquilizans have
since produced several works involving the local community, employing
donated materials and creating complex installations from objects of
significance.

Mark Salvatus
Themes of urbanism and everyday politics are central to the work
of multidisciplinary artist Mark Salvatus, who also serves as co-founder
of local street art groups Pilipinas Street Plan and 98B Collaboratory.
Drawing inspiration from his urban landscape, popular culture and the
media, Salvatus depicts the contemporary experience, both in his native
Philippines and in the places to which he travels. Salvatus links cross-
cultural commonalities, as represented in Haiku (2013) – a video
projection of graffiti that the artist photographed during his travels
throughout Japan, New York, Australia, and Indonesia. The video links
otherwise unrelated people and cultures to create a global dialogue. In
2014, the artist presented Latitudes at the Cultural Center of the
Philippines – a series of three works engaged with socio-political issues
surrounding the resources of land, air and water.

Gary-Ross Pastrana
Familiar objects are deconstructed beyond recognition in the conceptual
works of Gary-Ross Pastrana to the point where they inherit a new form,
significance, and function. Pastrana is interested in the consequences of
transforming an object’s physicality, observing how its connotations are
subsequently changed. Set Fire to Free (2002) explores whether an
object can retain its ‘thing-ness’ if it’s broken. Pastrana destroyed a
ladder, burning a section of the remains and creating bird from its ashes.
For Two Rings (2008), the artist melted two of his mother’s rings and
shaped them into a sword-like object to investigate whether that physical
transformation would alter the material’s sentimentality or worth.
Pastrana concluded that the monetary value wouldn’t be lost, but more
significantly, their sentimental value augments as the rings’ properties
merge. Pastrana reconfigures reality to reveal an object’s truth.

José Santos III

José Santos III has long challenged perceptions of ‘the everyday’. In his
early works, Santos painted hyper-realistic trompe l’oeil scenes and
surreal, dreamlike compositions. The multimedia artist has developed a
cryptic style, leaving his work open to interpretation. He continues to
explore a fascination with objects in an effort to uncover their histories,
simultaneously obscuring the viewer’s perception of the
familiar. In ²hide (2014), and exhibition at Pearl Lam Galleries,
Santos exhibited a new body of work featuring everyday objects imbued
with new meanings. Unnoticed objects are often placed in the spotlight,
repositioned to create a new experience. Santos evokes a renewed
appreciation for the hidden, showing us the extent to which we take
objects for granted in daily life.

Costantino Zicarelli
Costantino Zicarelli is a self-proclaimed failed musician and graffiti artist
whose works reflect the history of drone metal, black metal, and
everything rock n’ roll. His works and exhibitions are often inspired by
song lyrics, such as his 2013 show at Silverlens titled white as
moonlight, as white as bone, as dark as the snake, as dark as the throne.
Exploring pop culture’s ‘dark side’, Zicarelli’s graphite grey drawings
reveal images of skulls, dark forests, locks hanging in tangles, disco
balls, smashed guitars, dead rock stars, and tattoo emblems. The
artist explains that his practice is less about being a groupie, and more
about showcasing a less chaotic side of the industry. His 2014
exhibition The Dust of Men was inspired by the work and aesthetic of
Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey. From images of sacrifice
to decay, this exhibition showcased the eternal fragility of humankind.

Norberto Roldan
Founder of Black Artists in Asia – a Philippines-based group focused on
socially and politically progressive artistic practice – and Green Papaya
Art Projects, Norberto Roldan addresses local social, political, and cultural
issues. His assemblage of text, images, and found objects consider the
lived experience of daily life in the Philippines, alongside the complex
country’s history and collective memory. Roldan places particular
emphasis on historic objects and their capacity to retain
significance once they’re discarded and forgotten, questioning whether
an object is inherently sentimental or exclusively endowed with meaning.
His assemblage titled In Search For Lost Time 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 (2010) was
inspired by Hitler’s apartment in Berlin, which was supposedly
incongruous with the megalomaniacal dictator’s nature. The work
questions the ways in which objects reflect who we are. The Beginning of
History and Fatal Strategies (2011) was inspired by Jean
Baudrillard’s essay titled The End of History and Meaning, in which the
philosopher argues that globalization precipitated the dissolution of
history and the collapse of progress. Each work is a collection of old
objects displayed in cabinets, recalling a past that is fabricated by an
attempt to create a sense of order from forgotten memories.
Philippine Contemporary Art as a Post-War Phenomenon

LEO BENESA
Modern or contemporary art, although a by-word for decades in the Western world, is a
phenomenon of the post-war period in the Philippines. This is not meant to detract from the
yeoman efforts of Victorio Edades, Carlos Francisco and Galo Ocampo, who were known as
the ‘Triumvirate’ in progressive art circles of the pre-war period. The art of these three men
was indeed contemporary in intention and direction, but their role was more needed historical
and transitional rather than iconoclastic. A new group was needed negotiate the actual
aesthetic breakaway from the established canon to the abstract, expressionist, symbolist and
other modes of creative expression characteristic of the art of the modern world.
For a while the ‘Thirteen Moderns’, a loose grouping which included the three men, appeared
to effect the desired seachange, but somehow they did not have die necessary collective
anima. This could probably be attributed to the enervating traumas of World War II. The
iconoclastic role, instead, was assumed by a more dynamic group of six artists whose names
are closely associated with the early years of the Philippine Art Gallery (PAG) in Ermita,
Manila: Romeo Tabuena, Hernando Ocampo, Vicente Manansala, Victor Oteyza, Ramon
Estella and Cesar Legaspi.
Three of the ‘Neo-Realists’, as critic Aguilar Cruz called them, namely, Oteyza, Estella and
Ocampo, were self-taught artists. But they were no mere Sunday painters. Ocampo’s
paintings, in particular, showed an almost scientific preoccupation with color and design that
nevertheless seemed to spring from a feeling for organic form. A synthesis work entitled
Ancestors was shown at one of the annual exhibitions of the Art Association of the Philippines
(AAP), a national organization of artists and art lovers which was founded in 1947-48.
In addition to Hernando Ocampo and his group, the PAG in its early years also started to
attract other painters like Anita Magsaysay Ho, Nena Saguil, Mario and Helen Roces, and
Manuel Rodriguez. Rodriguez subsequently moved away to found his own Contemporary
Artist Gallery and workshop. Although diverse in style and temperament, the Neo-Realists
and their companions shared a common dissatisfaction with what they considered as the
static art of the Establishment, as exemplified by the painters belonging to the rural-pastoral
school of Fernando Amorsolo.
The decisive battles between academic art and the new expressionism took place in the
annual competitions of the early fifties. In an effort to avoid a direct confrontation and
showdown, the AAP divide the entries into two categories, ‘conservative’ and modern’,
artificial and untenable classification which was subsequently abolished. For all practical
purposes, the ‘war’ between the two camps was won during the 1954 AAP exhibition at the
Northern Motors showrooms. In protest over the choice of winning entries in the competition,
a group of genre and landscape painters led by Antonio Dumlao walked out with their works
and forthwith set them up on the sidewalks for public viewing. They then organized the
Academy of Filipino Artists, which continued the sidewalk exhibitions for a few years in front of
the Manila Hotel, only to disband unobtrusively later on and leave the field to the practitioners
of the new movement. Before 1954, in fact, two painters, Arturo Luz and Fernando Zobel, who
were to influence the directions of this new movement considerably, had started to show their
works at the PAG and AAP exhibitions. The two represented a new breed: educated abroad,
they stood for the painting for painting’s sake point of view, the so-called ‘painterly’ approach
Luz through his spare lyrical style, with its emphasis on neatness and linear values, and Zobel
through his Matisse-like color improvisations but chiefly through his lectures on art at the
Ateneo de Manila which have had a profound influence on Philippine art appreciation and
criticism. Another painter of the same orientation and spirit also came back from studies
abroad to strengthen the camp of the PAG group. This was Constancio Bernardo, who was a
disciple of Albers and his optico-geometric colorism.
Thus, with the entry of these newcomers and the walkout of the followers of Amorsolo and
Fabian de la Rosa (and indirectly of Luna and Hidalgo), the controversy – which had begun
with the return of Edades in 1928 and had been exacerbated by his arguments with the
sculptor Guillermo Tolentino and Dominador Castañeda on the nature of artistic distortion and
representation – came to an end. It was a complete rout in favor of a new expression and
expressionism. All that was needed now at this stage was the emergence of the daring ones
who would plunge Philippine art into the mainstream of the international style of abstraction.
Indeed, with the appearance of Zobel and Luz, new names began to assert themselves in the
late fifties and early sixties: Cenon Rivera, J.E. Navarro, Jose Joya Jr., Federico Aguilar
Alcuaz, Joan Edades, David Medalla, Lee Aguinaldo, Ang Kiukok, Jess Ayco, Zeny Laygo,
Malang, Hugo Yonzon, Oscar Zalameda, Rodolfo Perez, and Juvenal Sanso. The majority
gravitated this time around a new showplace, the Luz Gallery, which assumed the functions of
the PAG as the latter gradually lost its old vitality.
Two painters, in particular, Joya and Aguinaldo, started producing canvases in the tradition of
the New York school of abstract expressionism. Joya orbited into non-objective art while he
was painting in Detroit, Michigan, with an explosion of spring colors entitled Magnolia Tree.
Probably taking his cue from Zobel who was doing his ‘saeta’ series which were paintings
applied with syringe instead of brush, Aguinaldo started flicking threads of paint with palette
knife onto canvas to produce expressive abstractions with monumental effect. Perez
advanced the frontiers further by spraying his colors on, to produce vibrating tonal zones in
the soft-edged idioms of Rothko.
And, as if to dramatize the fact that Philippine Art had become international in grammar, spirit
and geography, Aguilar Alcuaz left for Europe in 1956 and came back in 1964 still doing
figuration but in a highly abstract yet viscerally disturbing style. The Philippine-artist-in-
voluntary-exile is no new theme in the history of Philippine art, and the case of Aguilar Alcuaz
is not unique even in recent times. In fact, Tabuena – the most prolific and sensitive among
the early Neo-Realists – had left much earlier and has not come back so far, preferring an
artist’s life in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to painting in his own country. Nena Saguil had
also left earlier, and ended up living and painting in Paris for 14 years before finally coming
back to Manila for a retrospective show in 1968 at the new Solidaridad Galleries. Manansala,
who paints in what he himself has called ‘transparent cubism’, has done some world traveling.
Anita Ho has lived in Brazil, and now resides in Canada. Zalameda is an inveterate
continental traveller. The gifted Medalla, who has abandoned painting in favor of kinetic
sculpture, has been living in England for the fast few years. Zobel and Sanso, who are
Philippine-born Spanish citizens, sojourn mostly in Europe, although they come back
periodically to Manila to show their latest works.
How far Philippine contemporary art has progressed since Edades and his painting, The
Builders, may be seen in the fact that at the 1964 Venice Biennial the painter chosen to
represent the Philippines was abstractionist Jose Joya, together with the modernist sculptor
Napoleon Abueva. Also, it was the first time that a Philippine painter ever took part in an
international exhibition of this magnitude. The Philippines did not win any medals (Pop Art
was the word then), but the participation itself was historically significant and prepared the
way for other Philippine painters seeking international stature.
The following year 1965, Tabuena sent his works to Brazil to represent his country in the 8th
Sao Paulo Biennial. Two year later, in 1967, the paintings of Hernando Ocampo were also
shown in Brazil at the same biennial, while Aguilar Alcuaz represented the younger generation
at the 5th Biennial de Paris.
A painter of sardonic humor, Navarro also took part in the 1967 Sao Paolo exhibition, but in
the field of sculpture. Indeed, a whole book can be written on the works of a number of’
Philippine artists who have been active in both painting and sculpture.
In the meantime, the mid-sixties also witnessed the maturation and emergence of a new
generation of young painters who may be considered as the legitimate aesthetic offspring of
the progressive elements of the immediate post war period, especially of the Neo-Realists.
Highly conscientious and competent, the young painters have been winning the big prizes
offered yearly in national competitions. It is noteworthy that the older painters, apart from the
fact that they are already well-known, have declined to compete against these young men in
the annuals of the Art Association of the Philippines, preferring when they do take part to
participate hors concours as guest artists.
This new generation divides itself into two groupings, but with no real discernible organization
or leadership. The first cluster consists of Roberto Chabet, Angelito Antonio, Florencio
Concepcion, Charito Bitanga, Antonio Austria, David Aquino, Norma Belleza, Antonio Chan,
William Chua, Veronica Lim, Leonardo Pacunayen, Angelito David, Antonio Hidalgo, Noel
Manalo, and Manuel Rodriguez Jr. The second cluster consists of Alfredo Liongoren, Kelvin
Chung, Marciano Galang, Virgilio Aviado, Ben Maramag, Benedicto Cabrera, Edgar Doctor,
Lucio Martinez, Efren Zaragosa, Raul Lebajo, Raul Isidro, Prudencio Lammaroza, Jaime de
Guzman, and Lamberto Hechanova Jr.
In the works of this new generation of Philippine painters are polarized all the progressive
tendencies and thrusts of Philippine art, as well as the basic drawbacks inherent in the act of
working derivatively within the continuum of the international art movement (and its various
recent manifestations like pop, op, minimalism-maximalism, hard-and soft-edgism,
colorschoolism, and so on), to the detriment of the growth of national art, whatever that may
mean. In any case, these young artists are the true heirs of the Philippine contemporary art
movement. Their performance in the next few years together with that of their more spirited
elders will largely determine the shape of its content.
Reference/s:
From the NCCA-published book by Benesa – What is Philippine about Philippine Art? and
Other Essays (originally from Verlag Neves Forum, 1970). For inquiries on the book, contact
Glenn Maboloc of Public Affairs at 527-2192 local 614 or email address paid@ncca.gov.ph.
Available also at all National Bookstores.
About the Author:
Leo Benesa is a poet, essayist, and above all, a professional art critic. His works in art
criticism include his column for the Weekend of Daily Express. He was one of the founders of
the International Association of Art Critics. Among his books are Joya Drawings (1975), Galo
B. Ocampo: 50 Years of Art, The Printmakers (1975), The Art of Fine Prints: A View of 25
Years (1980), and Okir: The Epiphany of Philippine Graphic Art (1981).