Joly Benitez & Joanne De Asis: The Life Force behind Jana Benitez

One afternoon fated with gray skies, Shakespearean rain and much talk about art, the life force and such, we meet the dramatis personae of today’s article who are truly extraordinary Filipinos.

Jose Conrado “Joly” Benitez is a self-confessed “angry old technocrat” who dreams of a genuine countryside development for the Philippines — not the kind bandied about by sanctimonious filchers of the nation’s coffers, but the kind designed to loosen up the grueling gridlock that is Metro Manila.

 The man, who worked as Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Human Settlements in governments past, is also an artist. As a young man, he hung out at the Fine Arts department of the family-owned Philippine Women’s University. He used to do monolithic murals, 10 of which were displayed at the Technology Resource Center or TRC. Hosted the weekly figure-drawing sessions for the Philippine Association of Printmakers (PAP). 

The man had been ill for 16 years, undergoing dialysis four times a week in four- to five-hour sessions, spending staggering amounts of hours in ICU, staying in a condo after the operation for one year to stave off infections — “a year of just thinking, reading, writing.” Joly tells of his ordeal: “I had three Extreme Unctions. They were already measuring my coffin, everybody was crying.”

What were his thoughts during those trying times?

“I want to live,” he shares. “I want to do some more work. I am insanely committed in bringing about countryside transformation.”   

Joly’s wife is New York-based Joanne De Asis, one of the country’s top investment bankers and a senior adviser at Morgan Stanley. She just came from a meeting with Washington SyCip; even on holidays the top brass are still neck-deep in work.

“When Joly was ill, I asked Morgan Stanley to put up a rep office in Manila so that I’d have a justification to stay here (to look after my husband). I told the board, if in two or three years, we don’t make money, I’ll (put together) a group to buy it so that (the firm) will get its money back. And our daughter Gaia, an investment banker, asked to be transferred to Hong Kong.”

Joly and Joanne have been married for 31 years. “It’s perfect,” says Joanne. “I was in New York, he’s here in Manila, so when we see each other it’s all-positive. When they ask me what’s the secret to a successful marriage. I tell them, ‘Live apart, live on different continents!’ (laughs).”

We ask husband and wife to talk about one extraordinary Filipino artist. Their daughter Jana, who is in Bangkok for a meditation retreat.

Jana De Asis Benitez’s first show was at the Ayala Museum when she was — get this — 12 years old. Her suite of Abstract Expressionist-Fauvist paintings of faces showed her love of innovators such as De Kooning, Gauguin and Picasso, who Jana quotes, “Painting is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants.” (An idea that will cast such a powerful influence upon her art in the years to come. An oxymoron comes to mind: aesthetic foreboding.)

That young girl has since mounted exhibitions in New York (“Recent Paintings” at the Walter Wickiser Gallery), Berlin (for the German Institute for Cultural Diplomacy), Singapore (“Incarnate” at Galerie Steph) and Manila (Finale Art File, Renaissance Gallery). Father and daughter had a successful two-man show last year at the Erehwon Center for the Arts in Old Balara, Quezon City, aptly titled “Apple by the Tree.”

Two well-respected critics have good things to say about Jana and her art. Alice Guillermo points out, “Jana comes up with her own personal idiom, a language that she has cultivated on her own from the sheer pleasure of painting with colors, lines and masses in sweeping compositions that satisfy the spatial length and breadth.” While Cid Reyes observes that as an abstractionist, “Jana is constantly aware of the unexpected intrusions of a figurative reality in what is essentially and purposefully an abstract painting… Jana exacts all the expressive possibilities of which each squiggle of form or nuance of color can convey.”

Collectors have snatched up Jana’s paintings when she exhibits at home. Her paintings are on view at the lobby of the Solaire Casino Hotel and the boardrooms of SGV Foundation and Transnational Diversified Group. Vicki Belo has her eye on one of the 35 latest pieces. Jaime Laya and Loren Legarda, too. “Her prices are high,” says the amazed dad. “I can’t even afford her paintings.”

Now, Jana returns to the Ayala Museum for a show titled “ Life Force,” which opens on Aug. 8, Friday, at 6 p.m. A sort of homecoming, as the U2 song goes. It’s about going full circle.

“By the time she was five, Jana would mess up our walls (of our home) in New York — writing and painting. So we had to keep changing wallpapers (laughs),” recalls Joly. “In school, when she got bored, she would doodle. When she graduated high school, she got a gold medal in Philosophy.”

Joanne adds, “When Jana was a kid, she spoke French more fluently than English because she went to Lycée Français (in New York). We couldn’t understand her at home (laughs). Her sister Gaia went to Sacred Heart in Manhattan, a year ahead of Lady Gaga, while Jana when to the strictest boarding school, Groton in Massachusetts.”

Jana then went to Brown in Providence, graduating magna cum laude (the highest award at that particular university) in Visual Arts. Joly says, “Then Jana told me, ‘I’ve done what you want. I’m going to give my diploma to mom and do what I want from now on.’” 

Jana is 28 years old now, and her dad calls her a 25-hour artist. She’s a voracious explorer as well.

After Joly’s daughter got her degree, she went to China to learn martial arts at a Daoist temple on a mountain in Wudang. She also went to New Zealand, apprenticing at the Pataka Museum of Maori and Pacific Arts. She spent a year in Chile, studying History at the Universidad de Chile and Fine Arts at the Universidad de Catolica. She even lived in a teepee without running water and electricity in New Mexico. Oh, and she honed her painting skills at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Mom shares, “Jana read Albert Camus and all those French philosophers in the original French. She speaks good, refined French, which she learned at Lycée Français, and — since she learned Spanish in Chile — we tease her that she speaks a truck driver’s Spanish (laughs). Very expressive!”

Last year, Jana spent six months in a farm in Austin, Texas: milking cows, building a fire without matches, etc. 

The father says, “She travels and she paints — that’s her life.”

Images and words

The difference between this exhibit and the past ones are the texts upon texts that accompany the large acrylic paintings (see box below).

Jana is into all these questions about cellular memory. How even our DNA can be changed by external things such as social constructs and circumstances. “Jana is very deep into all of that — this whole non-separation between Spirit and Matter, the Life Force, Eastern and New Wave thinking about self, about liberation, about confronting one’s fears.”

One of the passages written on the walls is: “Dear Fear, I love you, liberate me.”

No matter how Jana’s art has evolved through the years, her dad says there is consistently an underlying factor.

“There is always an inferred narrative — it’s telling a story, even if she’s abstracting it. But she’s very interested in painting faces and figures. So, when she’s trying to capture the Spirit, it’s within that context.”

Or in one of Jana’s paintings, the Spirit that will not bow down to Flesh. Just yet.

“This one called ‘Triumph’ was painted after I had a successful kidney transplant,” explains Joly, pointing to one of the centerpieces of the show. Joanne loves a painting titled “Amante.”

“There is so much movement,” she says. “The woman is strong, independent, unabashed but classy — it is a nude woman, yet there is nothing erotic or cheap about it. Look at the face. The face has serenity, togetherness. It’s a strong whole woman.” The subject’s pose reminds the mom of the gestures in the opera Carmen.

Another nude was the fruit of a drawing session at home: while Joly was still sketching, the daughter had already finished a full painting in two and a half hours. 

“She works in the calm of night, sleeps during the day,” says Joly. “She will do her Kung Fu exercises, do some reading, Skype with her mom, and start painting at about 9:30 p.m.”

What advice did Joly give Jana about painting?

“Well, I just talked to her about tonal values and color,” he answers. “She’s very good with colors and composition. In the past I just told her to put fine lines to add traditional dimensions.”

These paintings — part of Jana’s suite of “Life Force” artworks — are the results of the artist seeing herself as a conduit of a “Greater Intelligence.” (Remember the Picasso quote in paragraphs past?)

In an earlier interview that came out in The STAR, Jana explains, “You do get affected by what’s around you. But when you can let go of the influences of your rational mind, of the tendency to willfully create what you think you should… you feel release and expansion. This has been the focus of my practice now.”

Everything just flows together.

A man who overcame sickness unto dread. His wife who crossed oceans just to be by his side. A daughter who sees the Spirit operating even in the jurisdictions of the Flesh.

And knows that art, like love, is surrender.  

* * *

Jana Benitez’s latest exhibition, “Life Force,” will have its formal opening and book launch on Aug. 8 at the ground floor of the Ayala Museum, Makati Ave. corner Dela Rosa St., Greenbelt, Makati City. The show, a part of the museum’s New Frontiers series, is on view until Aug. 31. For information, call 759-8288 or visit www.ayalamuseum.org.