Home Grown | Masters of Philippine Modern Art

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HOME GROWN MASTERS OF PHILIPPINE MODERN ART

Angelito Antonio With a career spanning more than fifty years, Angelito Antonio’s oeuvre firmly occupies a significant position in Philippine art history. A protégé of one of the so-called ‘Triumvirate’ of the early Philippine Modern Art scene, Galo Ocampo, Antonio’s style visibly takes cues from the early Modernists, adopting thus the aesthetic sense of the European cubists. However, more so than Picasso or Braques, and notwithstanding the visible influences of Ocampo and Manansala, Antonio’s treatment of subject and form bear traces of Fauvist sensibilities. Paring down his scenes to the essentials, Antonio assumes the role of a storyteller, bringing only the elements imperative or central to his narrative. He has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate this in his appropriation of the Mother and Child model: from the voluminous protective embrace of a mother, whose gaze catches that of the viewer, in Nanay at Anak — to the rich warmth that charges through, and envelops another pair in Aking Galak.

b. 1939

In keeping with the cubist tradition indigenized by his mentors, Antonio’s surfaces are marked with trenchant strokes that result in striking geometric figurations. Reality is deconstructed and put back together like jigsaw pieces; defying the rules of linear perspective, Antonio offers myriad ways of entering the space of the painting. These markings, together with the artist’s exceptional skill in blending stark reds, greens, yellows, and blues, and his incisive use of light and shadow give way to recesses and protrusions that result in surfaces that seem to undulate with life itself.

It is through his distinctive method and masterful treatment of the picture plane that Antonio’s typical scenography of market places, mother and child, and vendors are not only there to be looked at, but engender in their viewers different and new ways of seeing.

Holy Artifacts 35.5 x 49.5 in Oil on Canvas

35.5 x 49.5 in Oil on Canvas

Aking Galak 30 x 24 in Oil on Canvas

Pamilya III 40 x 60 in Enamel on Canvas

Lubos na Pagmamahal 30 X 24 in Oil on Canvas

Humble Abode 18 x 24 in Oil on Canvas

Munting Pamilya 20 x 24 in Oil on Canvas

A Mothers Care 24 x 18 in Oil on Canvas

A Mothers Determination 16 x 12 in Oil on Canvas

Balloon Vendor 24 x 30 in Oil on Canvas

Top - Bottom Balloon Marketer 18 x 24 in Oil on Canvas Balloon Merchant 14 x 10 in Oil on Canvas

Sunrise 12 x 16 in Oil on Canvas

Nanay at Anak 36 x 36 in Oil on Canvas Previous Page Face Mask 36 x 36 in Oil on Canvas Cotton Candy 36 x 36 in Oil on Canvas

Sapatos 36 x 40 in Oil on Canvas

Norma Belleza Coming from a family of billboard and movie marquee designers, Norma Belleza is no stranger to the art of constructing captivating compositions. Known for her expertise as a colorist, the UST alumna and contemporary of Mario Parial and husband Angelito Antonio, among many others, is a painter of exuberant tableaus of simple rural living.

Belleza’s works are markedly demonstrative of horror vacui, committing to every last bit of the picture plane, an indispensable element: the hat of a farmer, who has retired the day to be with his family, nestled among a splay of fresh fruit; a vendor in the distance whose attention a group of women clad in pristine Filipiniana had justifiably caught — his momentary glance captured; a small area of a lake or river from which the livelihood of a whole village springs, its generosity evidenced throughout the picture. Her mise-en-scène teems with activity, each detail an homage to the simple, ubiquitous, and overlooked.

Consistent throughout Belleza’s bucolic tableaus of native daily life is her use of a multiple-viewpoint perspective evocative of

b. 1939

Cezanne. Take her scenography of Family Picnic. All at once, the viewer is positioned on the side of a sliced mangosteen, below a basket of yellow fruit, on level with bouquets of flowers, and above the family of three.

The same dynamic approach to space is observable in the visual feast proffered in The Heart Raises its Call for the Feast.

Not following any one linear perspective, the artist privileges all. Though captured in a cacophony of color and shapes, the figures, objects and the landscape itself appear to harmonise as the planes tilt, sway and shift this way and that. Bodies curve towards one another, and trees and flowers follow, leaning inward, while the feast sweeps across the foreground, as if in an embrace of the whole scene.

Belleza’s particularly deft and playful execution of this technique not only brings her subjects to the fore but also brings her viewers into the space she painstakingly constructs.

We know where these objects and people are in space: a space that we are warmly invited to enter, and interact with.

Family Picnic Series 36 x 40 in Acrylic on Canvas

The Heart Raises its Call for the Feast 48 x 58 in Oil on Canvas

Filipiniana 24 x 61 in Acrylic on Canvas

Mario Parial

1944 — 2013

Born out of the idyllic rural and quintessentially Philippine town of Gapan, Nueva Ecija, Mario Parial dedicated his life work to translating his childhood into exuberant works of art.

Over a 40-year career, the master practiced printmaking, sculpture, photography, graphic design, and painting. Before his graduation from UST in 1969, together with Norma Belleza, he studied under the master printmaker, proclaimed father of Philippine printmaking, Manuel “Mang Maning” Rodriguez Sr. A virtuoso of the first order, it was also during his early student days that Parial, then only 21, mounted his first solo exhibition, and went on to win first prize in the 1966 Art Association of the Philippines Art Competition. The following year, he received the Benavides Award for Outstanding Performance for the University Prestige from UST. He would go on to teach printmaking and painting at his alma mater and the University of the Philippines for more than a decade.

After suffering a slipped disc, Parial took a momentary break from his painterly practice but did not cease his decadeslong search for new modes of artistic expression. He began

dabbling with digital media during his recovery, eventually melding computer-generated images with the fluid delicacy of watercolors.

Like a watershed, after he had recovered from his ailment and gotten back to his painting, works from his later years abandoned the static, statuesque configurations of figures, in favor of a greater sense of movement. While his trademark of high contrasts and lively palette remained, rougher edges and more dynamic strokes supplanted the smooth and still quality of his early works.

Surrealist, decorative, narrative, distorted, his works defined a style he had begun exploring back in the 1990s but considered too avant-garde to put in public view at the time. As the Philippine art scene warmed up to the bizarre, embracing the hyperbolic forms of works like La Musique and Saranggola Festival, Parial continued his exploration, pushing the possibilities in the artful depiction of the human form.

Nuestra Señora de Antipolo (Good Voyage) 36 x 48 in Acrylic on Canvas

Harvest 29 x 32 in Oil on Canvas

Saranggola I 29 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

Saranggola Festival 36 x 48 in Acrylic on Canvas Previous Page Me and My Kite 21 x 14.5 in Acrylic on Paper Up in The Sky 14.5 x 21 in Acrylic on Paper

La Musique 48 x 36 in Acrylic on Canvas

Selebrasyon 24 x 48 in Acrylic on Canvas

Clown with Birds 36 x 24 in Acrylic on Canvas

Saranggola Festival 36 x 48 in Acrylic on Canvas Previous Page Flourishing 15 X 22.5 in Acrylic on Paper Tulips 15 X 22.5 in Acrylic on Canvas

Balloon Vendor 28 x 20 in Acrylic on Paper

Magkapatid 21 x 14.5 in Acrylic on Paper

Magkaisaing Damdamin 24 x 47 in Acrylic on Paper Sunflower 14.5 x 21 in Acrylic on Paper Previous Page Three Ladies 22.5 x 30 in Acrylic on Paper Mermaids 22.5 x 30 in Acrylic on Paper

Benjie Mallari Characteristic of Mallari’s genre paintings is the synthesis of cubist multiplanarity and minimalism, resulting in a visual language that demonstrates the artist’s keen understanding of the rules of perspective, coupled with a fresh approach to the surface’s dimensionality.

That the artist was most known for his powerful editorial cartoons and caricatures critical of the Martial Law regime in publications Sunday Malaya Magazine and Ang Pahayagang Malaya translated in his journalistic approach to painting.

Although it is immediately apparent that his works are unconventional portrayals of reality, it is this dynamic play of planes, color, and shapes that Mallari dedicates to his scenes

1955 — 2020 of everyday humdrum that achieve a remarkable degree of verisimilitude. More than images, each work seems a facsimile of life itself, capturing its subjects in motion. Known primarily for his historical imagery, Mallari noted his vacuous backdrops “make my work more timeless and more modern making them more relevant to today’s viewers”. Pasted on these abstracted color fields, the subjects of Mallari’s genre scenes are extracted from any one time period, setting, or context in Philippine history. Engaged in mundane tasks and activities, they appear no different from us, save for their garments, modes of transportation, and effects on their person.

In Transit 48 x 36 in Acrylic on Canvas

Modes of Transport 36 x 24 in Acrylic on Canvas

Stop Over-Somewhere in the North 48 x 36 in Acrylic on Canvas

Liberation 48 x 36 in Acrylic on Canvas

Dominic Rubio Dominic Rubio’s oeuvre sees the revival of the Second Modernists’ imaginative figurations. His iconic doll-like caricatures with their distinct long necks and almond eyes, as Reuben Ramas Cañete noted in 2013, has “carved a unique niche in Philippine and Southeast Asian contemporary art”.

To fully appreciate Rubio’s seismic appeal and influence in the Asian arts scene is to recognize his genre-bending appropriation of four different styles and types of Philippine colonial painting. In his 2013 inquiry into the artist’s mass appeal, Cañete identified traces of four important forms popularized by the Spanish in the Philippines, in Rubio’s contemporary works: tipos del país, miniaturismo, recuerdo de fotografo, and letras y figuras.

b. 1970

Defining a new genre of genre painting, by mixing history, genre, and portraiture, Rubio has proven to be an artist with a heightened awareness and understanding of not only a colonial history but a deeply colonialist historiography; his works, which have rightfully garnered worldwide renown, continue to demonstrate his ardent determination to dislodge it.

Miata 36 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

Príncipe 30 x 40 in Oil on Canvas

Date Night 30 x 40 in Oil on Canvas Clase Alta 30 x 24 in Oil on Canvas Previous Page Entourage 36 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

Double Date 36 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

Vespa Date 30 x 40 in Oil on Canvas Angkas 40 x 30 in Oil on Canvas Previous Page Mon Señor 40 x 30 in Oil on Canvas

Paseo Familiar 36 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

Like Father Like Son 36 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

Bicicleta 36 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

Gentlemans Ride 36 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

Jinete 36 x 48 in Oil on Canvas

MASTERS OF PHILIPPINE MODERN ART Angelito Antonio Norma Belleza Benjie Mallari Mario Parial Dominic Rubio