Richard stuns guests with his 1st one-man show at Pinto

The biggest among the 31 pieces featured in Ormoc Mayor Richard Gomez’s first one-man exhibit covers one wall of the four galleries of Dr. Joven Cuanang’s Pinto Art Museum in Antipolo City, which opened last Sunday, Dec. 17, and will last until Jan. 16, 2018.

“I did each of those four panels on the floor,” said Richard who barely made it to the opening because he first made sure that relief efforts were in order before flying to Manila, and went right back to Ormoc which wasn’t spared by the fury of Urduja.

On hand to entertain the guests were Richard’s wife, Ormoc Rep. Lucy Torres, and their daughter Julianna, 17, whom Richard described as his inspiration. “Huwag ka munang mag-boyfriend,” Richard teased Julianna, “otherwise kakalbuhin kita.”

Titled Yolanda, the painting depicts the destruction wrought by the killer typhoon that claimed thousands of lives mostly in Tacloban City in 2013. In the souvenir program article titled Motions in Pictorial Space: Surface by Richard Gomez, Carlomar Arcangel Daoana wrote: While most of the works register as pure abstraction, Gomez anchors each with a specific phenomenon or experience (the devastation wrought by a super-typhoon or an earthquake, a direct encounter with the cosmos) in order to vivify it with human element. This is represented by the polyptych, Yolanda, which is composed of four square panels. Individually, each panel can stand on its own as a model of calligraphic abstraction but, once put together, the completed piece is a depiction of the terror — and the magnificence — of a storm in full intensity as it unleashes one of the worst natural destructions in human history.

The exhibit is so titled (Surface) as, according to Daoana, “it alludes to the canvas as slate on which drips of paint are projected and enacted through the action of the wrist, the forearm, the entire body in order to physicalize presence and the inner state of the artist.”

Done in acrylic, the paintings are described by Richard as “experiential.”

Explained Richard (who has been an art collector for years and has participated in various art exhibitions), “The paintings show how I feel especially about forces of Nature beyond human control,” such as, aside from Yolanda, the 6.4 magnitude earthquake that hit Ormoc (with fault lines depicted on the blood-red canvas) and the desolate landscape of Marawi after the war between the military and the terrorists.

All in all, the 31 pieces stun and shock (as far as our group reacted to them).

“…whatever he may decide to pursue in the future,” concluded Daoana, “Richard Gomez has bequeathed a collection works that is luminous, generous and far-ranging.”

(Surface is for the benefit of K.I.D.S. Foundation. Pinto Art Museum is at #1 Sierra Madre Street, Grand Heights Subdivision, Brgy. San Roque, Antipolo City, 1870. For inquiries, call Jenny Villanueva at 0927-7646270.)

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