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TAKE a
quick tour of
France
at the Art Center of SM Megamall featuring Somewhere in
France, the paintings of Manuel Baldemor in
commemoration of the 60th anniversary of
Philippine-French diplomatic relations. A painter of
Paete in Laguna, Baldemor has, through the years, built
himself a reputation as an artist-traveler, with his
easel and painting kit always in tow. As a result of his
artistic peregrinations (he is probably the most widely
traveled artist), he has held one-man shows in far-flung
cities such as Seoul, Beijing, Hong Kong, Jakarta,
Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, Kuala Lumpur, Osaka, Tokyo, Cairo,
Teheran, Tel-Aviv, Ankara, Madrid, Santiago, Singapore,
Mainz, Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Prague, Bratislava,
Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest, Moscow, Bern, Basel,
Amsterdam, Stockholm, Uppsala, Copenhagen, Helsinki,
Bergen, Vilnius, Riga, London, Paris, Edinburgh and New
York, enumerating them with a childlike, ill-concealed
glee.
Even as
a child, he dreamed of traveling, as he pored through
the Atlas of the World in his school’s library, his
imagination flying him to all parts of the world. But
it was in 1975 that he first traveled outside the
Philippines and, since then, he has been to more than 50
countries.
Baldemor
is eminently suited to the painting of places. He began
with drawings of his Laguna hometown, where he belongs
to a prominent clan of painters and sculptors—including
wood sculptor Lito and marble carver Fred—and collected
his work mainly consisting of drawings and sketches in a
book simply titled Paete. His art, which seems to have
come naturally to him, drew primarily from the
woodcarving tradition of Paete with its repertoire of
motifs, mainly curvilinear and floral. The folk penchant
for the curvilinear style infuses many towns of Laguna
and Rizal, such as Pakil and Angono, in celebration of
nature’s lushness and vitality. In Baldemor, this found
expression in two large pen-and-ink works of the ’70s,
Paete I and II, which celebrate the town and its various
artistic expressions, all composed in a large space
under the Sierra Madre mountains. However, the
complexity of these large works was rarely found in his
later acrylic paintings which place more value on color,
lightness, simplicity and cohesive organization.
The
artist’s other important influence came from Vicente
Manansala and his style of transparent cubism.
Manansala was his mentor during the years that they both
worked as artists-illustrators for magazines. From him,
Baldemor derived the structuring principle of cubism,
although in his work it became translated into the
compositional grid. It was under the senior artist that
Baldemor honed his art and developed his own artistic
personality.
To the
basic folk style, characterized by a charming naïvete,
modified by the sparing geometric influence of cubism,
Baldemor added a sensitivity to color and tone, the
special attention to water reflections, interest in the
quality of textures such as gritty stone walls, and the
suggestion of atmospheric effects with cottony wisps of
cloud. The composition is also characteristic of his
art. Figurative units, such as houses, buildings,
gardens, lakes and ponds, are situated or fitted into
the squares of the grid, a basic template; or an
adjacent group of squares compose a particular area of a
landscape.
In his
mind’s eye, Baldemor’s view of a town landscape in
France is invariably bright and colorful, the habitation
of casual and serene people at peace with themselves and
with nature. In his works, he does not so much dwell on
the big city, Paris, for instance, with its chic,
cosmopolitan and sparkling allure, so often the subject
of romance and myth. For most of his landscapes, at
least in the present show, are of central France or of
Provence in the south, with its picturesque villages,
and sometimes a medieval castle on top of a hill. The
rather identical houses of the town are neatly composed
in horizontal rows on several levels. But there is
little suggestion of the small country lanes lined on
both sides with flowering honeysuckle vines with their
tiny golden trumpets saturating the air with exquisite
fragrance, nor of the mimosa trees with yellow cascades
of cottony flowers.
As
Baldemor reminds the viewer, “It [France] is the only
country of Europe to belong geographically to both north
and south, and to have both an
Atlantic and
Mediterranean seaboard, a land of unique ambiance and timeless
landscapes.” The artist has also done painting-tours of
the
Cote
d’Azur with its winding esplanade along the coastline
where the blue of the sea is transformed into a dazzling
blaze of sun.
Yet, it
is also of note that, as in certain conventions of Asian
painting, particularly Japanese, there are no shadows in
these village landscapes, no hint of dark mystery or
negative emanations. All is clear and unremittingly
bright, except for some wisps of fog or mist rising in
the hills that do not take away from the soft
brightness. Some monochrome landscapes in grayish brown,
of dwellings huddled together under a lord’s medieval
castle, seem to take on a remote and distant air. Thus,
what arises from these landscapes are timeless images,
frozen in time and not subjected to change either from
acts of God or from arbitrary human caprice. Except,
perhaps, for the minute realignment of a wall or the
relocation of a spire, they are historical landscapes
without evolutionary narratives. Neither do they evoke
nostalgia because of their very evenness of tone, color
and texture, with figures assigned to their own space,
but possessing neither mass nor volume which would
otherwise lend a sense of gravity and tension. This
two-dimensionality or absence of volume is not in itself
a negative trait, however. It has affinities with much
of folk art, and its flat decorative quality has often
been turned into a positive value usually in forms of
applied art.
Rhythm
of the Land and Rejoicing Welcome clearly show the
compositional grid which provides the framework of the
paintings, the organization of which primarily involves
the arrangement of the units in relation to the grid.
The general horizontal orientation is broken now and
then by a vertical spire or a compositional device in
which the adjacent grids themselves are painted in
different colors, as though constituting different areas
of sky. Medieval Town is less grid-bound: the medieval
village alternates between levels of green vegetation
and banks of cloud, while ensconced in the mountainous
heights is a picturesque castle.
Paintings of light, color and serenity—they
appropriately celebrate the occasion of the 60th year of
Philippine-French friendship. |
