AN exciting art event this October is the felicitous merger of Britania Art Gallery, which has dealt with contemporary art for several years in Cubao, and Choice Expression Gallery in Makati specializing in the masters. Both galleries will merge spaces to form the Art Gallery Manila located in the La Fuerza compound on Chino Roces Extension in Makati.

Although the Old Masters and the young contemporaries stirring up the latest furor in the art scene will constitute two large sections, they will not be entirely disparate from each other because they will always invite comparison, if not interaction, and, among other things, show how the modernism of the generation of Ang Kiu Kok, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Cesar Legaspi, Juvenal Sansó and Bencab has proliferated into numerous directions as seen in the work of the young artists. 

The space for the Old Masters contains a number of masterpieces, now iconic, which used to serve as guiding posts, if not templates, for the following generation of artists. And yet, with a viewing of their work, one becomes aware of a certain soft closure between the artists of earlier times and the artists of our own time.

For, in general, it is now difficult to establish distinct affinities between the two generations. It seems, therefore, that there has been a prodigious explosion of talent in recent decades that has resulted in original styles, media and genres, as well as new ways of interpreting the human figure, far beyond the earlier limited dimensions

How did this become possible? Many explanations can be put forward. For one thing, the temper of the times has significantly changed: from the implicit folk sentimentality of the mother-and-child paintings, such as those of Cesar Legaspi and Bencab, or the reiteration of traditional cultural values in Magsaysay-Ho’s Women with Fans, to the undisguised urban brashness of the present conflicted city in which a painting like Wang-wang would only be possible.    

Also evident in the new works are new influences that have been a-borning since the ’60s but are only now in full bloom. The development of the technology in photography has been an important factor in present art, with the mixture of genres and media, and the camera as a corollary of painting even as each remains an independent form. This interaction between two technologies, film and painting, has led to a revision of artistic visuality and a greater freedom in composing the image, not only in terms of the foreground, middle ground and background, or in interacting and overlapping planes like a pack of cards as in cubism, but in boldly rotating the human subject, even warping it beyond familiarity and drawing out its full expressive potential as image. Space is not ordered according to any canon, nor is gravity a controlling force. Part of the technological influence is seen in the compelling portraits/close-ups which are intensely revelatory of flesh-and-blood humanity. Included here is the Wang-wang painting of Ronald Jeresmo with its near desperate intensity in proclaiming the arrival of a society mogul and, at the same time, articulating public demand and expectations. In another sense is Randy Solon’s serial images of children in various activities akin to a film strip. Technology also lies in his approach to light in which he brings out stark contrasts between light and dark in midafternoon sun and its shadows. Malyn Bonayog also falls under this approach, although her style is strikingly original in using a layer of visual patterns, here derived from swirling finger imprints in parallel lines over an image of family to express Lineage. This overlapping device is also used by Jose Mangrobang Jr. in Word Nutrition, in which, superimposed on a mother’s face,  is a child learning her first letters.

Likewise, another strong current influence is the contemporary coordination of fashion and media in creating a concept of beauty with an obsessive slant, bound up with ads and the revenue that the society pages get from a flood of endorsements. The new beauty concepts are embedded in the advertisements with the glamorous endorsers of the vast beauty industries. Showing this penchant is Nelson Bonta with his painting entitled Gabrielle, in the full accoutrements of a professional model. JP Jalandoni’s faces and bodies printed with floral and various designs, such as Double Sunrise, fall under this category, since his stamping and marking of designs necessarily involve a certain reification that would easily admit to a double face, with the skin as ground for floral arabesques.

Perhaps, stemming from the pervasive glamour values of the beauty industry is a surprisingly subtle shift in one’s concept of the body.  There is a general shedding of inhibitions which had earlier limited artists to traditional templates, for now the female body is approached with a tongue-in-cheek tone or sly humor in works that could not have been possible earlier. This is true in the work of Armica Acantillado, entitled Adam’s Apple, in which she amazingly contrasts a coy bride all fitted out in white lace with a row of wooden female mannequins standing in metal points. But, outrageously enough, these nude ladies with their own individual but muted facial expressions sport nothing but a luscious red apple in the region of their crotch, while white balloons rise above them. It can be read as both satire and spoof of weighty issues.  

 But in terms of women’s portraits, Prenship by Joey Ibay is a memorable work. Without a specific background, the artist makes use of the grungy expressionist tendencies in contemporary art, veering away from the clean and orderly to the bitter smudge of urban poverty and loneliness. Abstract elements contribute meaning to this portrait of a young woman, fiercely alone, with only a scraggly cat as her friend. Her life is hinted at by her dark smeared clothes similar to the cat’s streaked fur, and by the fine lines that hint at a nervous sensibility beyond the rugged exterior.  Of another genre is Julimard Vincent’s Pagkukunwari, in which the male subject claws at his face with surgical gloves and warps it beyond recognition signifying dissemblance or a crisis of identity.

There are other works that do not easily fall into categories because their theme is not currently popular, but are nevertheless brilliantly executed. One is John Paul Antido with his Land Escape, which shows various inhabitants in gorgeous costumes with their sea vessels confined to small islands. A man, for instance, is grooming his rooster in his small island plot.  The artist suggests the cramped insularity in which they seek through sea and air voyages new dimensions of life. Joseph de Juras’s Unwind portrays two skillfully drawn indigenous women with the cultural sign, a kris, above them.  Such an open-ended work teases the mind in its multitude of meanings. Only one remains, that of Jerson Sambayanan, an abstract pointillist whose work involves a fine technique eliciting endless movement in the advancing and receding of colored points. 

Clearly these new works, a number by multiawarded artists, on view in these new large spaces not only give pleasure but stimulate the mind as well because of their open-endedness, of the multiple significations in them enriched by artistic skills brought to a higher level with the latest tools that enhance visuality. Most of all, these new works open new dimensions into understanding humanity and the world.