Onib Olmedo for National Artist

Onib Olmedo would have been 71 years old last Monday, July 7. He  passed away on Sept. 8,  1996. Twelve years after his death, his  impact on the Philippine art scene remains strong as ever, as evidenced by the growing clamor to have him declared National Artist for Visual Arts. Such an honor will be fitting for the leading figurative expressionist of his generation acclaimed by critics as one of the major Filipino artists of the 20th century.

I remember how shocked, and repulsed, viewers felt upon seeing Olmedo’s works in 1971. At the time, Filipino art lovers appreciated the colors of flowers and gardens, the frivolities of still lifes and rural scenes on canvas. The new painter Olmedo produced works characterized by dark, somber and depressing tones. They portrayed emaciated people whose features were extremely grotesque and distorted. One painting in black-and-white, a savage rendition of the mother-and-child theme, showed a woman carrying an armful of children, all bones and spiky limbs and heads like petrified fruit. It would take a while for the public to appreciate the painter’s creations for their cathartic value.

From his exposure to the San Lazaro race tracks where he became a judge, and his roaming around the Malate and Ermite districts in Manila, he was inspired to draw interesting characters — prostitutes and musicians, a street construction worker, the tambay. He felt sympathy for them, he felt their angst, suffering, loneliness. The same gaunt, lonely look would be present in his soul-portraits of people of the upper social levels: executives, society matrons, ballet dancers and musicians.

Olmedo did not go by external appearances. He used various means such as distortion and transparency, “to entrap,” writes critic Alice Guillermo, “the fierce and elusive demons of the private psyche.” His depiction of his subjects, however, had an “ennobling impact on the viewer: the message that no matter how desperate life may be, the human spirit will triumph in the end.”

Olmedo used distortion, wrote critic Alice G. Guillermo, “as a tool to probe the depths of the human character. Because of this, he is often considered as expressionist, and rightly so.”

His local themes had what a critic wrote “a global vision and a style which give them a universal character . . . He highlighted their spiritual angst through his artistic medium, making use of distortion to portray the inner torment experienced by modern man.”

Onib, christened Luis Claudio Veloso Olmedo, grew up in Sampaloc, the fifth of ten children in a middle-class family. He took up architecture at Mapua Institute of Technology and placed seventh in the board examinations. He worked with architectural firms, formed an architectural firm with a partner who would leave for the United States, and then, in the ’60s, turned to art as a full-time profession. His nationalist fervor made him stay in his native land to pursue his life calling.

His career was launched with a series of paintings exhibited in 1971 revolving around the theme “Singkong Suka.” A subsequent series was “Beinting Suka,” which also, wrote Guillermo, “exuded an aura of spiritual alienation and psychological devastation.”

But Onib was no mere follower of European expressionists’ style.  According to Guillermo, his distortion was “unique to Onib, for it did not have to do with the cubistic structuring of the figure by the earlier neo-realists. Rather than using formalist devices to restructure the figure, he pursued expressionism through distortion, although in the artist’s case, he did not favor bold lines and clashing colors as in many of the European expressionists, but advanced a style that was quiet, profound and intense.”

He held various exhibits. In the late ’80s and ’90s, his art came of age. He was catapulted into national fame, with  collectors frenziedly vying for his works. A writer noted: “The adulation shown by the public for Olmedo’s work marked a new era in the history of Philippine art when Filipino viewers became more sophisticated and discerning, and began to understand the nuances of art, appreciating paintings for their cathartic value.”

Onib won gold medals in two Art Association of the Philippines Competitions and a Mobil Oil Philippine Art Competition; an “Araw ng Maynila” Award in art, and was one of Thirteen Artist Awardees of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

He won an award at the prestigious international art competition in Cagnes Sur Mer, France, in 1992  — the very first Filipino to be accorded such a distinction. His award winning works were two inkwash paintings.

The first, “The Apartment,” showed a guitarist strumming and singing within an impoverished two-level shanty.

The other, entitled “Concert at the  Alley,” a part of Olmedo’s “New York Series,” depicted the tension between a passion for culture exemplified by a person playing a violin in the fire escape of a New York flat and modern society’s obsession with life on the fast lane symbolized by the motorcycles on the lower part of the painting.

Olmedo’s impact on the art scene is evidenced by a whole new generation of artists declaring themselves as his self-confessed disciples, producing works he had inspired, and putting up exhibits that paid homage to their late master.

Onib’s paintings are permanently on display at Chateau 1771, a classy restaurant in Greenbelt 5, Makati. The paintings, owned by the restaurant’s co-owner Ricky Gutierrez, who was a close friend of Onib’s, show Onib’s characteristic expressionist style of distortion in portraits of waiters, ballerinas, sidewalk café habitués, and still-life. Two huge murals done by Onib in collaboration with Allan Cosio are also displayed — black and white murals done in acrylic on canvas, recounting the ambience of the district Ermita where the original Chateau was located in the 1990s.

Onib passed away at the age of 59 — such a waste, his admirers mourned. At this time, he was at the apex of his career; he had made his powerful impact, had delivered his message.

The artist’s life and works have been painstakingly recorded in  Guillermo’s Onib Olmedo, Dimensions of Depth, which was  published by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Nestor D. Jardin, CCP president, and Fernando C. Josef, vice-president and artistic director, describe Onib as “a fearless artist, bold in his day for probing deep into the human spirit and examining the human condition with brushstrokes that distorted shapes, lines, objects and the human face and figure to present reality.”

The Guillermo book classifies the artist’s works into early works, still-life paintings and interiors, mobility (ox-driven mobile stores, a race track, jeepneys and motorcycles), portraits and nudes, musicians and ballerinas, and his collection of paintings he was preparing to take with him to Vienna, Austria, one of them showing  three musicians (this one was his last painting before he passed away). Some of these are in the private collection of the late painter’s wife, Bettina Rodriguez Olmedo, and their two daughters, Gisella Olmedo-Araneta and Francesca Olmedo-Arias.

Viewers can see Onib’s audiovisuals by logging in to http://www.youtube.com (user) franjoo3.

My e-mail: [email protected]