THE last time I saw Cesar Natividad was back in the late ’80s, in a refugee camp. In the mid-’70s, he became a friend when he relocated in the then small city of Naga. Meters away from the Metropolitan Cathedral of the city, he put up a gallery that also had the best peanuts in town, the coldest beer, and plays of any kind. The place was simply called “Gallery.”

He was fresh from his works in advertising firms in Manila. Then he already sported a thick mustache, the kind that was über-fashionable in the ’70s. Think Tom Selleck. But this is too Hollywood for a person like Natividad, whose image would later inspire (again a word that does not do justice to the “creative” process) Roxlee, the indie filmmaker long before independence in cinema was ever a claim, to create the character of Cesar Asar. The image comes across as a dude, a closet iconoclast hiding behind a mustache that announces machismo and mean politics, the cartoon much too real for those who know Natividad.

Back then in Naga City, Natividad served as the local guys’ link to the art world in Manila, which was burgeoning then, even as the impetus for the arts was fueled by an unusually glib taste of a so-called Patron of the Arts forever it seemed ensconced in the Palace by the murky Pasig River. There were no arts council then but the Gallery more than made up for the lack of local patronage of any activity that approached the passion and feeling of anything that had to do with art.

People going to the place had beer and also Ionesco and Beckett and the omniscient placement of an oil painting of Mount Isarog, the dormant volcano that cast the bluest shadow over the city and the surrounding towns. The late Rudy Alano, poet and teacher, called it the best shot at the volcano. We marveled at the blur and the blue space, wondering if we would one day be able to buy that painting.

Then I heard from an old friend, Chito Irigo, that Natividad was having an exhibition at Philam in Malate. Then I remembered that Chito had some photos of Natividad’s works.

Outside of that oil painting of a blue mountain, the works of Natividad were done in ballpen. He summoned whatever palette the regular ballpoint pen could provide, cleaning the tips of the blue, red, green and black pen when the ink became copious. Always, he was clean in his ballpen as he was with the brush. The pen circled and circled starting at some point, with the figures and images, the shadows even, betraying a pointillist provenance.

But the works of Natividad never really owed its origin to Georges Seurat’s pointillism than, perhaps, perhaps, to the French impressionist’s beginning as a draftsman.  Natividad, as we observed him, was a stickler to cleanliness and the ballpen offered him the leanest tool to inscribe on a white space shapes and stories.

There are always stories in Natividad’s works. His series that could be placed under the title Mud-bath are really explorations on the gracefulness of the carabao, its horned visage and the rump exaggeratedly sinuous. In these pieces, the water buffalo’s body ripples with multiple vital lines around it.

This then insinuates movement in otherwise placid and dead surroundings. The carabao is moving after all in the mud or in the muddy river. Natividad offers us green and blue carabaos, in tandem and in numbers. As a herd, the carabaos replace the timidity with incipient tyranny.

One can be critical of Natividad when he illustrates sceneries demarcated by poverty.  His Barong barong, for example, is nearly decorative. Swathed in green, the piece is redeemed only by an overpowering presence of a mass of want and need, viewed from above by those who would never really understand how it is to be poor. The piece tricks us into accepting the world as we see it down there below, the colors muted and, well, lovely because we never inspect them close enough.

Dexterity is the mark of Natividad as an artist. His works are technical trompe l’oeil: are these lines really produced by a ballpen? The prettiness can sometimes assault us, as in his Rice Field, a compendium of mounds in primary colors. But there are his images of the mother managing a small store lush in greens and reds, or standing in front of her home, the dress not tattered and not even in Filipina costume, but just a regular woman, caught as if posing for a camera.

The casual and the habitual are given airing in Natividad’s artistry. No extreme situations here in his world, no sentimentality, just a familiar narrative told in a small gallery that served the coldest of beer, the best peanuts, and, on rainy days, poems about love lost and the darkest of humor about the absurdity of arts and life.