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A RARE
show of internationally renowned artist Federico Aguilar
Alcuaz has opened this week at the Galerie Joaquin at
371 P. Guevara Street corner Montessori Lane, Addition
Hills, San Juan. Except for a tribute in his honor done
by the Ayala Museum in 2005, the last exhibit of the
artist was 15 years ago at The Manila Hotel. The art
pieces now on display were sourced from the artist’s
collection and from that of his family in Germany—thus
they can be said to be among the best of his works.
This
present show definitively affirms that Alcuaz is one of
our top-level Filipino artists who have deservedly won
national and international acclaim. His awards are not
only weighty but of the highest order; among them are
the Prix Francisco Goya (1958) in Barcelona; the Diploma
of Honor at the International Exhibition of Art Libre in
Paris (1961); the Decoration of Arts, Letters and
Sciences, and the Order of French Genius, both from
Paris in 1964. The exhibit pays homage to Alcuaz by
opening on June 6, marking the 75th birthday of the
maestro, and will run until June 20.
While
Alcuaz is widely known to be an abstract artist of the
highest order, this show at Galerie Joaquin reveals
little-known aspects of his art in works done in various
media and genres. He was, for one, a consummate
portraitist, as shown by his highly refined pencil
portrait of his German wife, and the couple of
self-portraits done in his lively spontaneous style. He
was also a sculptor with busts of himself done in close
verisimilitude and more intimate, genial-looking than
one recalls. He also painted on ceramic plates, his
colorful figures and motifs enlivened by glazing. And
not the least, he designed stunning abstract tapestries
in the workshops of Brno, Czechoslovakia, in the 1980s.
What is
probably the secret of Alcuaz’s art is that he was a
true hedonist in his approach to life, nature and the
world at large. This is what rings true in his work, in
which his refined and sophisticated way of seeing,
feeling and transforming onto canvas guides his art
purely and uninterruptedly, with the least interference
of common considerations. He also took a great pleasure
in his materials and knew how to bring out their best
properties, discovering the secrets of color and tone,
as can be seen in his still life paintings and other
works
One can
venture to say that some of the most elegant nudes in
painting come from Alcuaz’s brush. It is in this genre
where he abides by the basic classical disciplines but
shuns theatrical gesture and dramatic color, and
situates them in a more familiar contemporary context.
It is the suppleness and ease of the nudes—they are
fully at home in their boudoir—that create their
harmonious poise, whether lightly crossing their legs or
resting their hands on their lap, a sweet and tender
vitality coursing through the body to the fingertips.
The nude is usually seated beside a curtained window
from which light softly blurs the contours of the sofa
and backlights her figure lending a glowing tone to her
skin. The elegance of the image also stems from its
sparing use of color limited to light ochre for skin
tones, browns, supple velvety grays and sparkling whites
for brilliant highlights. Sometimes the artist plays
with white to the effect that the quiet nonchalant nude
may seem to sit like a latter-day Venus on roiling waves
of ocean foam. To this the artist may add a burst of
color, a vibrant crimson for a spray of flowers. Another
nude may take a diagonal pose in a somewhat darkened
room with suggestions of vegetation in the window but
with only a colorful weave for accessory to her long,
flowing limbs. These subdued uncluttered images
nevertheless convey a dignity as well as a sumptuousness
that never cloys or tires the eye.
Alcuaz
is also known for his Tres Marias genre of beautiful,
long-gowned women with a 19th century air engaged in a
variety of domestic activities. Like the nudes, his gray
color scheme must have come from the influence of
Velasquez and Goya, and in these he also shares kinship
with Juan Luna. There is only one painting here of the
series, and it shows the Tres Marias with their guard
down, all elegance shed behind to hungrily wolf down a
repast, their teeth gleaming with sheer voracity. This
could well be seen as a counterpainting to the widely
favored Tres Marias genre, in which the artist’s humor
took over before he took himself too seriously in the
subject.
Another
series in this exhibit consists of his seascapes and bay
scenes which Alcuaz took great pleasure in painting.
Often, he opted for a subdued, gray palette with some
impasto, but he loved the space of sky that they opened
out to him. The gray tones captured the European
atmosphere of days turning into winter and the
melancholy air that they evoked. He painted the curving
coastlines and the boats plying the water in canvases
which are now recollections of places he visited, such
as Barcelona where he lived for 10 years.
Indisputably, Alcuaz is master of the still life and in
this, he releases his great love of painting. He takes
over from Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris, as well as from
Dali, but discovers his own pleasures. Often his still
life is arrayed on a beach with sun-drenched yellow-ochres
against a soft tourmaline sky, gently flecked with
white. For the artist, the still life itself is a
celebration of painting with its inexhaustible motifs,
techniques and devices interacting with one another:
squiggles, starbursts, open and closed forms, sharp
tonal contrasts, breathing spaces—all produced with
great spontaneity, humor and playfulness. Colors burst
everywhere and acquire a life of their own as he creates
subtle and deeply satisfying affinities between hues.
Sometimes, the still life may approach realism, as in
the bunch of grapes in a picnic basket by a beach, but
here Alcuaz dramatizes his subject with a strange,
preternatural sky in which, at the end, one inevitably
goes back to the basic modernist insight that the still
life is not an exterior image but an original
construction of the artist.
This is
a show that will certainly appeal to all viewers with
their own preferences in medium and genre. |
