Vinluan’s ‘virtù’

Nestor Vinluan is one Filipino artist who has uncompromisingly committed himself to high abstraction, as opposed to figurative or representational painting…. In these days when certain artists of his generation hop from the abstract to the representational, and vice versa, presumably in the hope of making it in the art market, Nestor Vinluan does not find it necessary to do the same. He is one of those rare birds, a painters’ painter. – Leonidas V. Benesa, 1979

Come Saturday, Sept. 8, Nestor Olarte Vinluan, one of the country’s outstanding contemporary abstractionists, presents a cache of large format works in a historic solo exhibition at the Gallery III of the Ayala Museum in Makati City. Entitled From Blue on Earth with Red, the exhibition assumes momentous importance as it closes the Ayala Museum by the end of the month, and to remain so until 2003, when it reopens in a much bigger and new complex museum structure designed by Andy Locsin.

More than a year separates the Ayala exhibition from the last time Vinluan mounted his 11th solo exhibition of works, entitled Of Earth, Sky and Spirit, at the Artwalk in SM Megamall in December 1999.

With characteristic vengeance that attended the Artwalk exhibition, in the current undertaking, Vinluan once again unleashes an abundance of passion for art, taking on to a lifetime vocation with full-dressed maturity, combing concepts and tempering techniques that continue to poke his mind as an artist.

But unlike his Artwalk exhibition, which constituted a sizable collection of works – with paintings becoming objects, and consequently, objects becoming an environment, and then mirrored back in the paintings – Vinluan’s Ayala 12th solo exhibit is focused on what he does best: painting.

Displaying in handsome terms virtù, a quality admired most in Renaissance Europe, Vinluan presents paintings in large format, mostly 4-feet x 8-feet in horizontal approach, that manifest his innate vitality and ability to make cogent visual representations of many of his often breathtaking intellectual ideas, yet avoid at all costs and cause, any tendency to be dogmatic or philosophizing.

As Cesare A.X. Syjuco said of him and the works included in his Paintings, Objects and Installations at the Luz Gallery in 1986, the last time that the artist showed large works, Vinluan is "both craftsman and provocateur, scholar and showman."

Drawing inspiration from the earth, as gleaned from the exhibition title, Vinluan distills and structures his images into color bands and fields, geometric and free forms, textures and volumes. The landscapes alluded in his works are not of the representational kind but are of the mind, heart and soul.

The allure in a Vinluan work is its quietness. While his palette remains ebullient, the colors are chosen to signify a celebration of life in sublime peace. There are no obtrusions to frazzle the visual experience. Helped by the spartan use of symbols that are either personal or universal, the appeal of the works remain minimal. Everything in his works is essential, as if to emphasize that the realm of the spiritual is virtually abstract. Hence, the more abstract the work is, the more spiritual the experience becomes.

The exhibit is an eloquent testimony to Vinluan’s incisiveness of thought and mastery of his craft. Each work is meticulously handled to ensure that each bears his personal stamp of artistic finesse, a quality that is sadly fading, if not totally lost, in much of the art that is produced in the country today.

One takes to a Vinluan work from sheer attraction to it. The purity of the experience makes it plain aesthetic. The viewer marvels at the adeptness by which the artist captures textures without being slovenly. The colors burst like fireworks, ascending and then descending, as he meticulously applies dabs and dabs of pigments on canvas, using anywhere from four to even ten layers, such that in their overlapping and juxtapositions, in their confluence, the effect remains ethereal, quiet and sleek.

Ray Albano, in 1983, said the main virtue of Vinluan’s works is their intensity.

"Colors have their own radiance and the artist knows well how to charge them to their full energy. It is only at this instance that color becomes a feeling of ambiguous presence, exceeding all aspects of sensuousness beyond metaphor and objecthood. And yes, Vinluan’s colors are more expressive than ever. To consider him the finest colorist of this present generation here may be an inaccurate declaration to some people, but certainly this speaks much of the quality of his colors," Albano said.

Eighteen years may have passed since then. But Albano’s observation remains succinct to this day as far as Vinluan’s colors matter. In fact, the intensity of the artist’s colors is so virtuous now, made possible by Vinluan’s virtuosity as a colorist.

The exhibit runs until Sept. 30, after which, the Ayala Museum will be turned down to give way to a new haven of art in a couple of years. Meanwhile, museum operations continue at the Glorietta 2 where the historical dioramas will be on view starting October, while future art exhibitions will happen at the Makati Stock Exchange Bldg. along Ayala Ave., where the museum had its early beginnings.

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For comments, send e-mail to ruben_david.defeo@up.edu.ph.