Iluminada Camagay-Carag stands before an oil on ethylene-vinyl acetate painting, unable to remember where she and her late husband bought it from during the latter part of 1997. “It was in a gallery somewhere in Intramuros; the name just escapes me.”
She was about to celebrate her 50th birthday back then when she received the painting as a gift. It was also that time when her husband was working as a disaster coordinator for the World Health Organization-Western Pacific. “This was relevant to him because the art piece depicts Mount Pinatubo’s lahars. It was just so beautiful; we didn’t even know who the artist was.”
According to Carag, it took them three years to find him and by that time, the painting already accumulated mold in her home in Libis. “When he came by to our house, he just asked us, ‘Mayroon po ba kayong basahan?’ He then spat and wiped the whole thing with it, the mold never appeared again,” recalled Carag with a chuckle.
The painter and the buyer reunited recently in an unlikely setting: inside a university.
The name of the artist is Alfredo Esquillo Jr., and the artwork, called Bahala Na, now hangs on the walls of the Ateneo Art Gallery on loan for Esquillo’s newest exhibition, titled Continuing Spirit: Alfredo Esquillo. On view until January 2019, it is a 25-year retrospective that gathers 37 of the artist’s major works—from depictions of social, historical, and communal identities to his enduring fascination with religious symbolism and iconography.
Esquillo himself was at the opening of the exhibit. With a nervous smile, he said at the gathering: “I’ve prepared something here.” With this, he pulled out a piece of paper, flattened the creases on the edges and read, “There are many things to remember when you think about 25 years in a man’s life, or in this case, in a man’s heart.”
He continued, “1993 was a special year for me because it’s the first time I consigned a painting in an art gallery, which was Hiraya. It’s also the year where my work, Kalungkutang Panloob, Kaligayahang Panlabas, won at the 10th Metrobank Young Thinkers annual competition. As an artist, it was a good start for me in the art scene. But in retrospect this was in the ‘90s, where there weren’t enough art markets to speak of, there were very few galleries and even fewer opportunities. As an artist, I had to struggle, like many young artists back then. But there was so much promise in us, and the hunger didn’t stop us; it just made us hungrier for more… and so we continued.”
Esquillo studied Fine Arts at the University of Santo Tomas. Since then, painting has remained the mainstay of his practice, with which he continually explores the “political consciousness of the nation within a post-colonial paradigm.”
“The ‘90s was also the time to argue about nationalism and identity. My father guided me to find purpose in my works. Because of my father’s teachings, I thought that if man and woman are both flesh and spirit, then art made by man and woman could be both flesh and spirit, too.”
The exhibit, which was curated by social realism proponent Renato Habulan, is a three-part show featuring the winning paintings from national and international competitions, as well as Esquillo’s creative experiments, including canvases woven together into mat patterns and face cutouts of archival photos.
Esquillo’s works are heavily influenced by the bible (from the studies of his father) and the folk religiosity in Quiapo, which started when Habulan, who is also a mentor, took him there to witness the celebration of the Feast of the Black Nazarene.
The first section of the exhibit centers on this theme, in addition to his interest on the concept of “loob,” which he began developing in the 2014 triptych-panel exhibition Sequence Consequence where he explored the balance between materiality and spirituality. The central space takes up pieces from the Banig series to archival photographs from a Los Angeles-based mural project rooted in the subject of Philippine-American war. Finally, the third section features his tragicomedy series where he rendered narratives through theatrical compositions of figures in different spaces.
The exhibit coincides with the launch of Esquillo’s self-titled book, with a biography by Jay Giovanni Bautista and critical essays by Patrick Flores, Lourd de Veyra, Tessa Maria Guazon and the late Alice Guillermo.
With a wealth of exhibits, the book, and his established place in the Philippine contemporary art scene, Esquillo shares one valuable lesson which he learned during the span of his 25-year career—and that is to continue.
He said, “The challenges [have been] both big and small but no matter what happened back then, I held on. I held on to my brush year after year and I painted. I also held on to things that were meaningful to me. After taking too many steps in one’s journey, one can never go too far.”
To his friends and family, he gave his thanks, looked up and said, “The struggle is still here, and the struggles define us more than the successes. I believe no matter how far one may have reached, one will still come back to where it all started, and that is His spirit. One begins, one returns. There’s no end, we are all continuing spirits in this journey.”