In a throwback exhibition, an attempt to converse with the present
When you enter León Gallery, the purpose of the show, “Filipinos in the Gilded Age,” curated by Liliane “Tats” Manahan, Lizza Guerrero Nakpil and Ramon Villegas, is immediately apparent: to be transportive. The gallery space is made to appear as one of those opulent, well-appointed rooms of the past, showcasing the taste and the sophistication of the owner. Regaining your bearing, you come close and analyze the glow of lemons in one painting, the sheerness of fabric in another. There are more than 10 Lunas in this one space, you are told.
But the sense of transport sublimates, delivering you to the complications of the now. While the paintings hark back to subjects no longer here, to artists no longer alive, they are as much a part of today as of the past, their presence persisting in the 21st century, in a time when portraits and landscapes can be had in seconds with a press on a cellphone camera’s button (with an added filter and a hashtag, perhaps?). While the portraits look out from gold-leafed, old-fashioned frames, the need to be represented, to have an image of oneself captured for posterity, feels very much like a modern predicament. Before, you had oil paint and canvas; now you have the camera lens and the digital space.
Organized by way of genres — one wall contains portraits; across it, seascapes —these paintings claim our attention for the sheer discipline and grandeur of replicating reality when the camera wasn’t yet then perceived as an artistic medium but as a mechanical — and cumbersome — tool of reproduction. They hewed closely to the artistic tradition during their time, confidently upholding the principles of composition, techniques and values of academic painting, before Impressionism, which was then already creating scandal in the salons, would gain traction and irrevocably alter the landscape of visual arts.
Tiny details — the abalone shimmer on a fan, the florets on a dress — inspire astonishment, but it is the disposition of the subject during the sitting which the artist chose to represent which carries the weight of these portraits. Did the painter portray her as brooding, extravagant, subdued? Was the taipan gentlemanly? In the act of portraiture, the artist captures, sometimes in multiple sittings, the subject as much as himself, as the tool is his subjective, soul-laden body, not the impersonal eye of the camera. Every portrait, as we are always reminded, is a self-portrait.
It’s sheepish, of course, to doubt photography’s representational, artistic and democratizing power, but “Filipinos in the Gilded Age” reminds us why painting has continued to hold sway in this day and age: it can imitate, as well as create, reality. Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo’s seascape might be patterned after an actual French coast, but it is a world of its own, where sea-stung waves break across a phalanx of rocks, the burst of light holding the spray, the paint rising, curving and breaking into streaks of impasto. Its light could only be evoked by oil paint, a kind of generous luminosity that would suffuse the works of later masters such as Fernando Amorsolo and Anita Magsaysay-Ho, as well as the works of Vicente Manansala and Carlos “Botong” Francisco.
Aside from extolling the virtues of painting, “Filipinos in the Gilded Age” seeks to trace the contours of the Filipino identity, as exemplified by Luna, Hidalgo, Fabian dela Rosa, and Felix Martinez, among others. Ilustrados all, they were instigators or the result of the Revolution, using the colonialist tools to delineate the limits — and the possibilities — of the Filipino. While the subject matter was the foreign or the affluent, the paintings forged the “eye” — the vehicle and capacity for seeing —whose gaze would eventually be directed internally, to the landscapes and people of a post-Hispanic Philippines.
In the absence of context, nostalgia is dangerous, as it posits that the past is transfixed and is somehow better than the present, but “Filipinos in the Gilded Age” avoids the trap by presenting the works as continuities from the grand tradition of European painting to the continued vitality of the medium. Through the deft, almost magical, intervention of their artists, the faces looking out from the gilded frame and age stare back at you as if to convey something urgent and revelatory, across the chasm of a century.
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“Filipinos in the Gilded Age” is on view until July 20 at the León Gallery, G/F Corinthian Plaza, Paseo de Roxas, Legaspi Village, Makati City. Call 856-2781 for appointment.
