The 'SYMple' life

Sofrorio Y. Mendoza, known to the artworld as “SYM” after his initials, strikes one as a funny man. The artist narrated an incident where, as he was painting the famed Seine River early one morning, he saw a couple duck under a raincoat and, in the utterly French way, make love. It proved to be a battle of concentration, SYM laughed, his one eye intent on the river, while the other kept being drawn to the couple who by now were ecstatic with moans.

This split attention between life and art has proven beneficial to SYM who in the early ’80s, amid his growing reputation as one of the most vigorous figurative artists — gifted with a razor-sharp focus and a calibrated sense of rendering detail — left the country to give his family, all of seven children and his beloved wife, a better life in Canada.

Now, one of the founders of the influential Dimasalang group has returned to his native shores with “New Visions II,” a show that exemplifies his departure from realism and his deft disassembling of image into its tonal and formal complexities, on view until Jan. 4, 2009 at The Crucible Gallery, fourth floor, SM Megamall A, Mandaluyong City. 

Practical artist

SYM, sporting a gray cardigan over a shirt with thin blue lines, iterated that he “made the right decision” in making Canada his new home for him and his family. “I was so amazed with the people in Vancouver,” he said. “Maganda ang lugar (The place was beautiful). I decided that I would bring my children there.”

It wasn’t an easy life, the artist admitted. “Para kaming mga refugees dun (We were like refugees there). We started from the bottom. We sacrificed a lot. My aim was to give my children proper education.”

Eschewing a day job, SYM quietly painted — this time with a smattering of images of winter — and tutored a small group of students in painting. His fame back in the Philippines provided leverage in introducing his works in Canada. “Since I was already known in Manila,” SYM said, “I achieved a certain kind of perfection in my work. I was able to penetrate those big-time collectors. I was able to live and I was able to send my kids to college. After 20 years, all of them have graduated (and have good jobs).”

Abstracting the world

Having fulfilled his job as a family man, SYM felt that it was time to go back to his first love, the reason why in the ’60s, with five pesos in his pocket, he took the long trip from Cebu to Manila, occasionally slept in Luneta, and made ends meet to study fine arts at the University of Santo Tomas and eventually at the University of the East. “I don’t care about the money,” SYM maintained. “I don’t care if I don’t sell another piece of work again. I have to follow what my heart dictates.”

His heart, apparently, pointed towards abstraction. It wasn’t new to him; back in college, he used to win prizes for his abstract works. At his level of maturity, SYM won’t just brandish his brush on canvas and call and sell the piece as abstract. He has little respect for artists that do so. What he was looking for is a new kind of expressiveness where images, before collapsing into their abstract components, reveal a symphony of patterns and where still lifes, as though seen through a prism, assert their unstable, dynamic quality in space.

“I have merged the real and the cubistic shape and form to express my own identity and my own perception of art,” SYM said, explaining his newfound vision. “It is an expression of yourself in your own point of seeing.”

Rather than repeating the Cubism of the 20th century’s most important artist, Pablo Picasso, SYM has managed to come up with his own interpretation where he, instead of flattening the splintered image, heightens the depth of each shape, imbuing it with its own unique tone and texture but still flowing harmoniously with other shapes, creating a richly evocative pattern through well-placed juxtapositions. “It’s more powerful than the real because you see all the sides, all the time.”

The process, mentioned SYM, is similar to “composing music” where “all the tones are related,” “movement and pattern create points of interest” and where you “recompose and orchestrate the shapes.”

The pursuit of happiness

At 74, SYM, the ever commonsensical- artist, doesn’t subscribe to the no-tion that suffering fuels great art. “Depression doesn’t connect to my work,” said SYM. “Look at Van Gogh. Van Gogh was depressed but look at his paintings, they are so bright…I already have a pacemaker. I have already been hospitalized many times. I have had angioplasty four times. You cannot see that in my paintings. My paintings are a celebration of a happy life.”

For SYM, it is ultimately the artist’s native intelligence, coupled with the experiences and knowledge he has garnered through decades, that ultimately shape and animate his art. Those who are “intelligent, knowledgeable and dedicated,” believes SYM, “have more freedom to express…the more intellectual you are, the more complicated your work is.”

That’s why for SYM, whose sense of mastery over his material is at once confident and unassailable, still thinks that he can still expand his artform even further. “That is always my dream, to be one step or two steps forward from what I am painting now.”

Currently, SYM is doing sketches for his next artistic project, this time revealing pockets of emotional intensity. No die-hard optimist, he knows that he is pushing against time. But SYM, who puts his trust in a grand design, is incorrigible. “In my art, I still have something to discover. I want to go where no artist has gone yet.”

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“New Visions II” will run until Jan. 4. For more information, call 635-6061.