Two Bulakenyo traditions

Two Changing Traditions was the joint show of two very differently styled Bulakenyos recently at the Ayala Museum’s Small Works Gallery, both working on a common theme. The 44-year old veteran Paombong-based artist Jose Tanghal Caoili and 28 year-old former banker-turned-artist Andrew de Guzman from Pulilan are simultaneously tackling landscapes, but with their own respective twists.

Caoili, who hails from a long tradition of academic painting fostered by Paombong’s artistic luminaries, like Teodoro Buenaventura Jr., Tomas Bernardo, and Jose Marasigan, paints with a classical discipline that is almost extinct nowadays, due to the miseducation that many of our art students are getting. With such teachers as Buenaventura, Bernardo and, for a time in his early youth, National Artist Fernando Amorsolo, Caoili definitely knows his craft, and can hone on to this exacting skill with the precision of a laser torch cutter, depictions real enough for one to be enchanted by its verisimilitude, but daring enough in impasto strokes to realize that it is, after all, just paint on canvas.

The subject matter of the peaceful rural landscape is, of course, very dear to his heart: Not only can he still see it in his hometown environment, but he imbibed the artistic tradition of Philippine landscape from his early years as a young apprentice to these modern giants of the rural idyll.

On the other hand, de Guzman, a De La Salle University management graduate, paints in the other painting tradition that Bulacan has unwittingly espoused: The gestural and organic abstractions of Jose Joya, who was born in Hagonoy. This abstract approach to Bulacan landscape can be seen as being continued by no lesser an artist than Philip Victor, whose parikpik series of lozenge-dotted monochromes actually suggest the gray monsoonal skies and floods that sweep the lower deltas and inundate the land, a timeless cycle of destruction and rebirth tied to both environment and sensibility.

In de Guzman’s case, the sensibility rotates around the placid, clay-rich, rock-strewn hillside riverbeds of the Angat River’s upper courses between Pulilan and Baliuag, which still lingers in his mind as happy spaces of childhood memories stealing away from home to bathe in its then-pristine rapids at midsummer afternoon’s torrid heat. The fact that one can no longer do so because of pollution is a tense vein that underlies the feeling of color-field calm – nature violated by man in his quest for progress, symbolized by the black lines that delineate rock and soil like the spreading tentacles of an oil slick.

The works that result from each are an indicator of just how vibrant and complex rural art in the Philippines is, although one may categorize Bulacan as a suburb of Manila rather than the far boondocks.

Caoili’s landscape series are often tinged in the late afternoon and early evening light, with its clear but dramatic atmosphere counter-posing the slumbering green-to-blue land with the salmon pink-to-lavender skies, gentle river waters rippling with multi-hued colors, and seas of emerald green rice stalks. It is animated by the solitude felt when one realizes a material culture is slowly dying in the face of urbanization: The lonesome carabao grazing in the meadow; carefree but distant children crossing the rice paddies; empty outrigger fishing boats moored in the twilight calm. His handling of paint shows the professional adherence of contrast, with its impasto work in the highlights bringing the flat underpaint into totalist relief.

De Guzman’s forte is the opposition between the dominant background of ochre to chrome yellow interspersed with the ovoid, darker brown, orange, yellow or whitish rocks, both sliced by curving lines of blue to black The heavy earthiness is sometimes alleviated by the trickles of aquamarine and turquoise that represent pristine waters, while short, wavy lines of moss green indicate river weeds flourishing in a living but endangered ecosystem.

The exhibition title intrigues us because of its unconventionality. Although everyone may assume that the classical style championed by Caoili is traditional, few have dared to claim that modern art is equally so. Ninety-seven years after Picasso’s revolutionary "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon" and Henri Matisse’s Fauvist works pulled the art world into a new aesthetic century, modern abstraction can now rightfully claim equal geriatric status, which does balance our perception of things. Unlike artistic attitudes 30 years ago, with its dogmatic stiffness, both classical figurism and abstraction have reconciled with each other.

Caoili’s works acknowledge the hindsight that the classic Filipiniana rural landscape has survived the humiliating insults it received under the Mabini label, and in our post-modern age, has become as socially and stylistically relevant as any modern style. De Guzman’s abstracts also indicate to us that the greater force of social attraction has replaced the previous element of shocking the audience out of their wits.

Both traditions, therefore, are changing, coping with the times and renewing their bonds to their audiences. Indeed, this show is a mutual greeting of two traditions in transit, espoused by the love of fellow Bulakenyos for their threatened homeland.