The show of abstract painter Jonathan Olazo, which fills the entire first floor of the Manila Contemporary on Chino Roces Avenue in Makati City with more than 40 paintings, gives the impression of a retrospective show with different stages of his development as an artist. The art works, all done in 2013, reveal five different categories. Several big works are colorful, gestural, tight, and textured, revealing the artist’s horror vacui. In contrast, there are smaller Zen-like works, their colors pale, the edges of their color fields vanish, sometimes, they soak one color. Other smaller works with one-tinted and heavily textured slabs are intentionally cropped to make them look like intimate close ups of swiftly running movements. Works with thin black lines subtly suggest shapes. Depths of horizons in other works reveal a mirage of nature. Canvases with words that hint of narratives and direct communications of feelings reject meditation ala Facebook. Not resorting to an arrangement of art works to explain categories, curator Eva McGovern has allowed unlikely partners to breathe into each other, as if their differences help them resuscitate each other. Olazo’s three-week exhibit which opened on May 18, is subtitled as “The Hotel Painter.” The show’s challenge, says the show’s literature, is for Olazo to reclaim abstract art from being dismissed as “mere decoration”. The hotel is chosen to make the metamorphosis more challenging. True, a hotel more than a museum or a gallery (with walls) as a space for creation can lure an artist to resort to exhausting exercise on varieties of forms, and end up with sound and fury saying nothing. Yes, Olazo has shown a capacity to embrace and extricate several ways to enliven his abstract works with varieties of “expressions more than forms,” done at a dizzying and breathless pace, in one year. “For me, what is important is the tension of figure and ground. I always try to eliminate perspective. I always explore surfaces that way,” he says of a guideline that sounds more like a foreplay because his art pieces look like they are often plunged into a chaotic creative process involving energy, heart, heat, mind, and speed. When asked if the foreshadowing of horizons in some of his works at the exhibit is intentional or a conscious revelation of the abstract painter’s signature struggle with figure and ground, he says that horizons, including little lines, vertical or horizontal, also expand and melt. Presenting this tension intentionally (or even unconsciously) in canvas is like revealing a work in progress - of the abstract artist’s effort to achieve an object’s essence more than its existence, and making that struggle become a work of art by itself. This tension, revealed or hidden, point to a deeper psyche of almost all Filipino abstract painters whose penchant is to blur the line (or take away the dichotomy) between essence and existence, the real and the imagined, the hidden and the obvious, the public and the private, creating, in the process, abstract pieces that vibrate of oneness and palpable life. A true and valid abstract art, says Olazo, has “true autonomy”. When done, it is almost apart from the artist. It is also about artists’ racial memory, explains Olazo. He recalls, “At the opening night of the exhibit at Contemporary, Sir (Nestor) Vinluan, (abstract painter and former dean of College of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines), described one of my works as almost old, almost like the work of Fernando Amorsolo (one of the country’s most important semi-impressionist-figurative artist who lived from 1892 to 1972).” “I don’t know if that should qualify me as a Filipino abstract artist. I have never been conscious about it. I mean, I don’t know if I have consciously made abstract works the Filipino way,” says Olazo. His comprehensive and grand approach at the exhibit in Contemporary has propelled him as one of the most energetic and prolific abstract painters in the Philippines today. At 43, he is also one of the youngest among a string of Filipino abstract painters who came into the art scene since after the World War II in the mid 1940s. He shares the throne of young and third generation abstract painters in the country today with young colleagues like Bernardo Pacquing and Paul Alcazaren. Because of the range of expressions that he has depicted in his canvases, his show is like a 101 on Philippine abstract art. It gives a hint about the development of abstract art in the Philippines, including where it came from – the American-born and European immigrant abstract artists who came to the United States (US) during World War I in Europe in the 1930s, and at the start of World War II in Europe and Asia in the 1940s. When these artists formed the New York School of art, they influenced many Filipinos artists, especially those who were sent as scholars to the US after World War II. The Philippines was the US’s first colony in Asia starting 1898. “It feels like a heavy responsibility to be part of the history of abstract art in the Philippines (or from where it came from),” says Olazo, whose mentor includes his father, abstract painter Romulo Olazo, 79. He has not studied abroad. “When I was young my father brought me to Thomas Jefferson (US Cultural Center) to watch a feature film on abstract expressionists in New York from the ’30s. Since then, I remained affected by (Willem) de Kooning,” he says. The Rotterdam-born de Kooning (1904-1997), who immigrated to the US in 1926, during World War I in Europe, is widely praised for his gross paintings of women, and later, for his landscape-oriented pure abstract works. When Olazo was a young student at the UP College of fine Arts starting 1986, he was already under the influence of other US abstract artists (from a distance) such as South Carolina-born Jasper Jones (1930), known for his flag paintings; Texas-born Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), of German and Cherookee descent, famous for combining color fields and found objects in the ’50s; Virginia-born Edward Parker “Cy” Twombly (1928-2011), adept at combining colorfields and graffiti; and San Francisco-born Spanish-Jew Richard Serra (1939), a minimalist sculptor known for working with large metal sheets. Since the influence of the New York-based abstract painters of that period remained long lasting, his dedication to abstract art in his student days was fuelled initially by the likes of Jewish New Yorker Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), famous for round objects arranged and compartmentalized in grid-like space; Dakota-born Clyfford Still (1904-1980), known for his irregular and jagged color fields whose more than 2,000 art works were unveiled for the first time, since his death in 1980, at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver Colorado in 2011; Pennsylvania born Franz Kline (1910-1962), famous for his black and white calligraphy-inspired paintings (that were also inspired by his sketches on telephone books); Wyoming-born Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) who learned the technique of drip and pouring (of) liquid painting from Mexican muralist David Siquieros in New York in 1936; Jewish and Brooklyn born Lee Krasner (1908-1904), wife of Pollock; and Washington-born Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), famous for his thick black and white calligraphic paintings. He was definitely touched by the towering Europeans who enlivened the abstract expressionist movement In New York at the time such as German Josef Albers (1888-1975), who immigrated to the US in 1933 and popularized his theory of color starting at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina and to generations of art students in the US; Russian Jew Mark Rothko (Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, 1903- 1970) who stayed in the US in 1913; Armenia-born Ashile Gorky (Vosdanig Manoug Atoian, 1904-1948), who suffered the Ottoman Empire-initiated Armenian genocide in 1915 and left for the US in 1920; and German-born Hans Hoffman (1880-1966) who entered the US in 1932. The young Olazo, however, was not influenced by another wave of European artists who subsequently went to the United States in the 40s, like German surrealist Max Ernst (1891-1976), who stayed in the US in 1941; and French Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp (1904-1980) who went to the US in 1915. The American influence has created a long line of at least 13 renowned abstract artists in the Philippines such as Hernando Ruiz Ocampo (1911 – 1978), national artist in 1991; Constancio Bernardo (1914 - 2003), from UP, studied at Yale University in Connecticut from 1948 to 1952 under Josef Albers; Nena Saguil (1914-1994), a UP student, recipient of Walter Damrash scholarship in the US from 1954 to 1955, studied at Spain’s Instituto de Cultura Hispanic in 1955, and stayed in Paris in 1956; Spanish Fernando Zobel (1924-1984), student of history and literature at Harvard in 1946, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1954, was mesmerized by Rothko’s work in the late ’50s, and donated his art works at the Ateneo de Manila before he left for Spain to establish a museum of modern art in Cuenca, Spain in the ’60s; Jose Joya (1931- 1995), a UP professor who studied in Madrid from 1954 to 1955, studied at Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art starting 1959, and became dean of UP College of Fine Arts from 1970 to 1978; Lee Aguinaldo (1933- 2007), whose flick painting was inspired by Motherwell, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhard, and Rothko; Olazo (1934), from UST, his diaphanous art works are collected worldwide; Roberto Chabet, 1937-2013, architecture graduate of UST, was with the Cultural Center of the Philippines in the mid ’60, taught at UP in the ’70s, and popularized avant-gardism among his students; Fred Liongoren(1944), from UP, who became a famous abstract painter while still a teen-ager; Rodolfo Samonte (1944), from UST, who popularized woodcut, silkscreen, and digital art and migrated to the US in 1977; Lito Carating (1948), from UP, a classical music enthusiast and peripatetic artist who is working nonstop for the past 50 years; Nestor Vinluan (1949), from UP, a recipient of Fulbright-Hayes scholarship for his masters degree at New York’s Pratt Institute from 1972 to 1974; was dean of UP College of Fine Arts from 1989 to 1998; Edwin Wilwayco (1952) from UP, studied at the West Surrey College of Art and Design in England under the sponsorship of the British Council. Shaped by abstract art’s 83-year old history in the US, and 68-year old fascination in the Philippines, it is not impossible for the young Olazo to seek the infinite possibilities of his favorite style of expression, with or without mentors from abroad, with or without studies in the US or Europe.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 10:43:19 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015