By Tito Genova Valiente / titovaliente@yahoo.com
Uya pa ako
naghahalat saimo
sa Baybay Sisiran
sagkod pa man
(Here i am
waiting for you
at Baybay Sisiran
till the end)
—From the Bikol lyrics of an Italian song adapted by Gualberto Manlagnit
AS in those lines, the works of Gualberto Cea Manlagnit are pictures in transit. Even the quietest of scenes feel like something is about to happen, or someone is about to leave or has already left. The painter’s task then is to wait, and, as he waits, he conjures shapes primeval, images as old as the act of anticipating itself.
The artist paints clouds, seas, mountains and flowers and plants. His clouds and seas are part of works that seem to be simulating memories of configurations. At first glance, they look like abstractions. But, once you stand away, the images are really realistic renderings of clouds and mountains and seas.
In a painting of clouds, two layers of white and dark gray are demarcated by a black swath. Red and yellow break out from the clouds with the lower layer closer to the mountains. The mood is quite somber. Can this be dawn or dusk? It really doesn’t matter; Manlagnit’s landscape or seascape invokes always an infinity, a space that offers no end.
In a composition that covers black mountains and an equally black shore, a body of water is dysenteric green, while, above, clouds of various formations occur. The artist appears to contemplate the shading of the clouds, their shift from one form to many other forms. Assuring that these are clouds, indeed, and not phantasms, a cluster on the upper left is recognizably clouds as we know them to be. Below that, however, is a jarring cloud-like pattern with jagged lines moving upward.
Manlagnit doesn’t wait when he paints flowers and plants. It seems these objects offer to the artist all their freedom, so that their colors and contours could be held captive. The proof of this conquest is in the manner by which the painter flattens the flowers, their hues the only vital signs, the only hope it seems for regeneration. The yellows and the reds in these works are pure energies arresting our field of vision.
If these are leaves and flowers, then we are seeing them in their best tint. All courtesy of this artist, who never, as the poet Kristian Cordero explains, considered himself seriously as an artist. It doesn’t surprise those who know the artist if he mocks, in a bravely self-deprecating manner, his own art. That doesn’t diminish his art; such act even underscores his own human vision of who we are before nature and other creations. Manlagnit was a raconteur, a poet, a composer, a politician.
Born on July 28, 1938, Manlagnit passed away on May 16, giving us artworks that bear no titles. In a sense, the artist has given us what he treasured most as an activist: freedom. We are now free, tremblingly perhaps, to confront the vision, these commodities of aesthetics and name them.
There are two works that he left and they need no labels. One is in monochrome green, save for a yellow where the pistil should be. The petals are green but that is not the unusual thing about this work. It is the seed, a bean, at the side of the flower/plant. The result is both witty and mystical as the artist illustrates without drama the story of growth.
Naif only in technique, Manlagnit outdid himself in a triptych—crude only in form, but not in content. He had the three panels connected by metal hinges. The first panel shows two figures, which I read as Adam and Eve. Two naked figures are in a massive garden that reaches up to the sky in all its greenness. An orange and red center has a globe floating above crags. At the uppermost portion of this middle earth is what looks like a page turned, signifying a story being told. On the right side uppermost floats a cloud and the figure of an old God, referenced and borrowed from ancient paintings of Genesis. The old God extends his hand, but no man is there to receive it. Look down, another circle, a body of land, carries the black figure of the devil.
In this story of creation, everyone waits. In the meditation of Manlagnit, the origin of faith is in the premonition, the expectation that the world will always be alright.