5 MOST ICONIC PAINTING

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For me, if there is something grand, something sublime, in the Spoliarium, it is because behind the canvas, behind the painted figures… there floats the living image of the Filipino people sighing its misfortune. Because… the Philippines is nothing more than a real spoliarium with all its horrors!”

Artist: Juan Luna

Location: National Museum of Fine Arts

Subject: Gladiator

Genre: History painting

Period: Romanticism

Medium: Oil paint

Created: 1884

During the National Exhibition in May of 1884, Juan Luna presented his oil painting titled Spoliarium to the public eye. The painting was described as “the largest work, the most frightful, and the most discussed work at the Exposition.” The painting is measured at 7.7 meters wide by 4.2 meters tall and it depicts a spoliarium, which is the basement of a Roman amphitheater. However, did you know that this painting inspired the Philippine Revolution?

After the news of Luna’s win, there were gatherings held at local cafés. Some of the attendees were Jose Rizal and Graciano López Jaena who are popular Filipino propagandists. Praises and speeches were made in regards to Luna’s win, as well as what his win stood for. López Jaena states.

The painting illustrates a dark imagery of what happens inside the confines of a Spoliarium. Luna created a scene that invokes a sense of dread by mastering the application of the “dramatic chiaroscuro effect,” which is an interplay of light and shadow. The left and right sides of the painting are dark and foreboding. On the left, people are leering into the basement with greedy eyes, scavenging the dead for valuables like vultures circling a carcass. On the right, grief is displayed as a father desperately searches for his son—and a mother sits beside her son’s lifeless body. However, despite the powerful imagery on either end of the painting, Luna demands attention to the center of the painting by highlighting the gladiator’s uniform and the blood of bodies being dragged in a bright crimson red.

The painting shows the suffering of not only the gladiators who risked their lives, but also the suffering of their loved ones. The deaths and suffering of the gladiators were viewed as “senseless” and “avoidable” since this is mere entertainment for the Roman Empire. Luna is making a parallelism of Rome’s violent imperialism to Spain’s violent colonization towards his people. This painting presents the truth behind the cruelty and bloodshed of Spanish colonization over Filipinos.

Due to the strong statement made by the painting itself, the Spanish imperial viewed Luna’s painting as an anti-colonial artwork. Propagandists like Jose Rizal used this opportunity to voice out the injustices and declared that Filipinos deserve equal rights with their colonizers, and because of this, he was declared as a rebel by the Spanish authorities, which led to his imprisonment and death in December 1896.

The painting currently resides at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila, Philippines, and can be viewed by the public as a reminder of the sacrifices that were made in order for Filipinos to gain freedom, independence, and equality.

Artist: Benedicto Cabrera

Title: Sabel

Location: BenCab Museum Baguio

Subject: A symbol of dislocation, despair, and isolation

Genre: Genre painting

Period: Social Realism

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Created: 1866 in light of the stature of her most avid collectors, sophistication and power.

Cabrera previously said “Sabel” is a homeless Filipino woman whom he photographed and first sketched in 1965. Her disposition became a symbol of dislocation, despair, and isolation for the painter — making her a recurring subject in his figurative paintings.

Sabel was a symbol of dislocation, despair, and isolation — the personification of human dignity threatened by circumstance. Sabel captured the mind of the artist as her makeshift clothing, made out of throwaway plastic sheets, created different shapes while she moved around, scavenging for food. He saw her around the Bambang area in Tondo for two years, until she just vanished into memory and into BenCab’s art. An idée fixe in the artist's celebrated body of work, Sabel has transformed since her introduction at BenCab’s first solo exhibition at Gallery Indigo in 1966. In her evolving iterations, the muse has become a platform for the artist’s explorations of form and meaning, her permutations paralleling the various art styles BenCab went through over the decades, from social realism to abstract expressionism to minimalism. As she made her way from traditional paintings on board to works on paper, canvas, and sculptures, the image of the destitute woman has indeed gone beyond who she used to be - becoming a symbol of his development as an artist - moving from disenfranchised vagrant and patron saint of the dispossessed to totemic exemplar of beauty and grace and, in many ways.

This major work is arguably one of the most refined, and quietly understated manifestations of his iconic subject. In the lower right corner of this rare oil on canvas, Sabel is ensconced in a cloud of elegantly draped fabric, her unkempt hair unmistakable. The color gradation of the painting, moving from sea green to white, reminiscent of the effect of his earlier soft ground editions, imbues a layer of romanticism to this work, a mirror image of the 1975 etching by the artist, Sabel in Flight. Only Sabel’s face is exposed by the artist to focus on her expression. The mixture of white and gray gives a glossy effect to the wrap, Sabel’s face is highlighted, a retroactive reprieve to the artist’s first muse. Her expression depicts the joy in the simplicity of life, complemented by the orange setting behind her.

Artist: Fernando Amorsolo

Title: Planting Rice

Location: National Museum of Fine Arts

Subject: Gladiator

Genre: History painting

Period: Romanticism

Medium: Oil painting

Created: 1921

An artist known for his distinctive art style and realistic paintings, Filipino painter Fernando Amorsolo is best known for his depiction of the country’s culture, its picturesque sceneries, portraits of women, and scenes from World War II.

One of his most popular paintings is “Planting Rice”, where he depicted a group of farmers — both men and women — toiling under the sun.

This 1921 oil painting by Fernando Amorsolo (Roa 1992, 97) is the earliest known version of a series of works, also titled Planting Rice, done by Amorsolo from 1921 to 1944. Another larger version, also titled Planting Rice and dated 1924, is in the Paulino and Hetty Que collection (Cruz 2008, 96-7). Both paintings share almost the same composition. The scene is set in a wet rice field with shallow pilapil (rice paddy) hedges forming orthogonal patterns rising toward the left horizon line. The field is populated by three groups of farmers. Three women in the left foreground are centered around a woman standing with her back to the viewer, a red tapis (outer skirt layer) covering her checkered saya (dress), and her right sleeve undone to show her bare shoulder. A second group is in the middle ground composed of nine figures positioned around another woman wearing a flaming orange saya and conical hat

A third group is in the right background, broken into a left grouping of two farmers with carabaos, and another seven farmers planting rice on the right.The horizon is dominated by a slight rise at upper-middle left, surmounted by a church with a single bell tower at its center pediment surrounded by trees. The sky is heavy with gray rain clouds, indicating that this is monsoon planting season, and casts a slight overcast light over the scene. An openwork basket filled with rice shoots ready for planting is at the center foreground, counterbalancing both the church at the upper-left background and the figures distributed from left foreground to right background. The 1924 version varies via the use of a slightly more intense sunlight, throwing most of the human figures under stronger shadows, and lighting up the rice shoots in the foreground, as well as the planted rice field in the left background.

Artist: Benedicto Cabrera

Location: BenCab Museum (Baguio City)

Subject:

Genre; History Painting/Social Realism

Period: EDSA Revolution

Medium: Ink and acrylic on paper

Size:75 x 55 cm. (29.5 x 21.7 in.)

Created: 1960

Yellow Confetti is a painting made by Benedicto Cabrera on the year 1984. It is made by ink and acrylic on paper. And it was 75 x 55 cm in size. The artwork painted the year prior as the artist returned to Manila, seemingly anticipated the revolution and identifies Cabrera with the movement. This revolution was identified as the “People Power” or “EDSA” wherein the iconic Yellow Confetti Rallies were made. On the painting, people who look like the rallyist, were on the right corner. While the yellow confetti which were thrown by them, was seen floating on the left side.

Within Yellow Confetti, a mass of demonstrators throng at the right side of the composition. Fists upraised, arms flung out, they are caught in the grip of their protest. Their feet planted stolidly on the ground are unshod, signifying their status as the 'everyman' of Filipino society. The yellow confetti flutters animatedly across the entire pictorial surface as if buoyed by the winds of resistance. It is revealing that the figures only occupy half of the pictorial plane. Whatever they are protesting against is not clearly represented, and open to a viewer's specific interpretation. Possibly coming from different families, occupations, and interests, the crowd each have their own personal motivations for engaging in resistance. Only the swirl of yellow confetti fully represents the latent tensions between protesters and regime.

The symbol of the yellow confetti has been used more than once by Bencab. A work dated from the same year as Yellow Confetti, "Two Filipinas in the Era of Multinationals" , depicts two girls clad in traditional clothing but arrayed with gadgets of our modern time - a handheld TV, earphones, a walkman - while holding a burger and with a crushed Coca Cola can at their feet. In 1986, the year that the Yellow Revolution ended, Bencab repainted this work as "The Edsa Event" ; where the central image was nearly identical to its prototype but the girls were this time festooned in a shower of yellow confetti juxtaposed against strips of red, blue, white and yellow paper. The motif of the confetti within Bencab's narrative has evolved into a symbol of the changing times and hope of a better future.

Yellow Confetti captures the humanistic face of a period caught in a flux, articulating the passion, energy and desire for economic stability and social justice; as well as the underlying fabric and foundation of contemporary Philippines - an epoch of political history within the last thirty years.

Artist: Elmer Borlongan

Location: Pinto Art Museum (Antipolo, Rizal)

Subject:

Genre; Food Insecurity

Period: 20th Century

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas

Size:91.5 x 122 cm (36 x 48”)

Created: 2017

Have you tried visiting an eat-all-you-can buffet and wondered what happens to all of the uneaten food after closing hours?

It is no surprise that the food in these establishments are discarded contributing to the 1.3 billion tons of edible food wasted annually by the world. Yet with all of these amounts of food in circulation, the United Nations recorded that approximately 690 million people or 8.9 percent of the world population is hungry. The problem is not the lack of food production but the accessibility to it, coupled with income inequality and economic instability

To better understand these troubling statistics, take a look at Filipino artist Elmer Borlongan’s works. Elmer Borlongan grew up in Mandaluyong. His experience living in both urban and rural areas of the Philippines allowed him to have a first-hand encounter on the various faces of food insecurity. His works represents the Sustainable Development Goals on No Poverty, Zero Hunger, and Reduced Inequalities.

The Happiest Place on Earth shows a person eating french fries.

For context, the french fries in this picture came from a popular Filipino fast-food chain. Rich or poor, Filipinos can recognize this emblem. For some, this simple food feels like a luxury so they have to save money just to buy it. Looking at the bigger picture, fast food chains and restaurants are key contributors in the global food waste production. Food services comprise 26 percent of the total food waste generated per year. This piece begs the question— with all of the problems fast food industries contribute, is it still the happiest place on earth?