The bulol presides over them to ensure the blessing of Kabunyan for a bumper crop of upland rice during harvest time. The pakkong, in much the same vein, serves to announce a tribal war. Both objects are fashioned from wood indigenous to the area by native carvers who have learned the craft as a tradition passed on to them from one generation to another.
Through the years, a legion of Filipino artists has continued this wonderful wooing with wood, both as a material and a medium for sculpture.
Jerusalino V. Araos is one such sculptor of note. As he candidly admits, wood, among many materials available to the art form, "is a thoroughbred. Only with proper reins will it win races for its rider."
And a race indeed he has won. No less than the National Museum of the Philippines has led to recognize this awesome and enviable métier of Araos where his wood works are concerned.
In commemoration of its 100th anniversary, the Museum recently presented the sculptures of Araos in an exhibition entitled A Centennial Celebration of Wood and Form. The exhibition is historic as it signals the first time that a living artist has ever been invited to present his works within the museum halls.
Only two eminent Filipino artists – Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo – are accorded this singular honor where exclusive exhibition halls in the museum are dedicated to showcase the extent and content of their works now revered as national treasures. In being able to exhibit at the museum, Araos becomes the third Filipino artist to enjoy the privilege, having not only one, but two salles in the museum even for over a quarter of the year.
Who knows? The enterprise may start a practice in the Museum (now under a new leadership) in making the halls of the museum accessible to other deserving artists whose works all Filipinos should view and be made aware of.
The exhibit undoubtedly articulates in robust terms Araos’ masterful handling of wood where the inherent color, grain and density of the sculptural materials are meticulously considered and respected. Employing both traditional and contemporary woodworking and construction techniques, and either polychroming the works or simply leaving them to sparkle in their natural finishes, Araos is able to eloquently explore, enlarge and emphasize the physical and expressive possibilities of wood.
Araos opts to harness in his art used and discarded wood, as well as storm-felled trees and leftover tree trunks that, when not properly attended to, would end up as unsightly piles of garbage on streets or at backyards. Through this creative mind and complemented by his dexterous hands, he magically transforms them into toys, tables, chairs, installations, objects of social commentary, and something he undoubtedly does best – torsos, whether male or female.
Araos allows wood to seek its own front. For him, wood – unlike clay, metal and other newfangled materials – does not take kindly to arbitrary dictation of design. A sculptor worth his salt respectfully allows his material to speak its own language. Wood, as Araos observes, "demands consultation and considerateness. On instances when aesthetic intentions match material character, a brilliant design emerges. Brilliant in the sense that the carver’s design appears to be a natural pattern."
Like his Cordillera predecessors, Araos recognizes both the pragmatic and formal appeal of sculpture. The manner by which the exhibition has been conceived, designed and organized reflects Araos’ two-pronged approach to sculpture. The largely functional pieces, like tables, chairs and toys, are hewn to broaden the audience’s encounter and indulgence with art. In the case of the interactive pieces, the intent is to extend the viewer’s experience of the tactile and the visual vis-à-vis or her other sensitivities as well as sensibilities.
Greeting the viewer outside the museum is "Kukunana" (2001), an architectonic sculpture done in various Philippine hardwood and architectural glass. Installed on the ramp fronting the building, the functional piece serves as shade from the sun or rain. On the main, it is an unobtrusive piece providing a welcome patch of color to an otherwise drab and gray concrete walkway of the pedestrian stairway. The structure’s vertical elements are shaped like stylized coconut trunks, and the roof frames like the rachis (palapa) of a coconut frond. The green glass roof is suggestive of banana leaves. The piece, therefore, substitutes for horticultural flora and which paved concrete cannot cultivate. A walk through the structure further provides the viewer an experience of pespectival depth often taken for granted when walking up the ramp.
With such charming prelude to Araos’ art, one hops into the museum with high hopes and solid expectation. Fortunately, Araos does not let his viewer down. The cache of works, numbering close to a hundred, is a convincing testimony to Araos’ engaging yet playful pursuit of the art for. The variety of artistic concerns often glazed with wry wit and sardonic satire, the varying dimensions of the works from the monumental to the modest, and the utmost care carried out in the execution of the works substantiate the mighty power of the hardly complaisant and revolutionary imagination of Araos.
Each piece is so assured in its artistic composure and completeness, reflective of Araos’ non-dilly-dallying stance for an art that he has personally imbibed and continues to preach.
Lording it over at the museum foyer is "The Caged Androgel" (various Philippine hardwood, 2001). It is the artists’ dig at the degeneration of social values in the country today. That it is displayed in the National Museum, the acknowledged repository of what people hold as valuable and beautiful, adds another dimension to the commentary.
The winged polychromed form a la Fra Angelico, emblematic of the highest value and purest beauty, is positioned inside a cage that resemble a stupa in a Buddhist shrine. With the appropriation of the architectural element, Araos conveys to his audience the Buddhist practice of affording worshippers hand access to whatever icon lies within the temple. Through the sculpture, Araos invites his audience to reach into the Androgel so that "they may self-suggestively imbibe its symbolic value and purity, feeling within themselves a newfound sense of goodness and grace."
Casually strewn in the two halls allotted to Araos works are tables, chairs, and toys. The idea is for the viewers to interact with the pieces, and not merely look at them. The welcoming mood inspires the audience to touch the pieces. One of the distinguishing hallmarks of an Araos work is its smooth tactility, inviting the viewer not only to run his fingers across it, but to actually caress it.
Araos creates tables beyond the usual context of dining in an attempt to imbue them with the air of being an altar. As he explains, "Tables as we know them today trace their origins from primitive altars. Early humans did not eat on tables. They took their food directly from the fire and ate it akimbo or astride a stone or a log. The table was the early shaman’s prop for his/her contrived ceremony. From this primitive communal society, the table evolved into an altar and much later into a dining table." Himself a gourmet, Araos holds fine dining as a celebration that assumes the aura of a High Mass. Surely, if one eats on his "Lamisa" (various Philippine hardwood, 2001), then eating carries with it a deep sense of communion.
Where his chairs are concerned, Araos has intentionally differentiated them from the conventional sample commonplace in households today. Take the case of "Bagahi" (acacia, 2001), which being different in scale or larger than life, does not adhere to the ergonomic measure of modern furniture. Whether or not it is a tribute to the Ifugao hagabi, the piece requires new manners of sitting from the user for as long as the principal purpose remains the same, the ensconcement of honor on whoever sits on it. After all, the original chair was a throne.
It is with human forms, however, that Araos exceeds expectation. Araos certainly knows by heart the intricacies that inhere in both the male and female forms. He goes beyond the almost stoic stance of the Greek kouros and kore by imbuing them not only grace, but movement and agility through a visual idiom reminiscent of a Bernini. But where Bernini’s Daphne is solid, done in marble, and showing the female form in its entirely, Araos’ dance is hollow, done in acacia, and showing simply the torso of a male form, headless and standing only on one leg.
The images of human forms caught in a dance, for Araos, harks back to an indelible experience that happened almost three decades ago when he had the opportunity to watch the performance of the Bolshoi Ballet at the Meralco Theater in Manila.
As Araos himself admits, the "visual impression of terpsichores, transforming space into a repository of grace… are gelled fragments of mental images that never seem to fade through time."
For the exhibit, Araos draws from the memory of that Bolshoi performance to present sculptures about dance. The pieces, when taken together, can form a collection in itself. They capture the human figure in varied postural attitudes where the sublime is handsomely revealed in the power and musculature of forms as they pierce through space.
Space once invisible rhythmically gives way in generous cooperation, making itself palpable through the presence, lightness and grace of forms engaged in a dance. Araos, through the contrapuntal juxtaposition of masses and voids, succeeds to delineate silence and sound, movement and stillness and interiorities and exteriorities.
The way the pieces are presented is almost choreographed in demeanor. Thanks to the artist’s dancer friends who have lent him a hand in blocking and arranging the forms as if the figures are actually doing their arabesques and pirouettes not on a dance floor but in the dance space.
All told, viewing the Araos exhibit is a like a dance. Starting with heavy and profound steps, the program shifts to the playful and animated before finally capitulating into a sublime coda.