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[March 05, 2006]

Perfect wedding of the figurative and the abstract

(Philippine Daily Inquirer Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)IN EGHAI ROXAS' QUASI-abstract world, unidentified objects float in space. We'd probably never know why they're there except for their virtuoso effect or as bravura element.

They're either a perfect orb, which could be a balloon, a ball, the sun, the moon, a planet, as in "Rhapsody" and "Landscape"-or a rectangular figure, which could be a log or a bone, as in "Levitation" and "Unified Elements." Or a combination of both, as in "Alternative Dimension." And they're set in visual space that could be a landscape, a seascape, or outer space.


Roxas' technique consists of layering of various textures and embellishing with gestural strokes. The rectangular shape is but a strip of impasto painted with shadow underneath, while the orb is delicately composed with highlight.

Here is the perfect marriage of the representational and the nonrepresentational in art-because these free-floating forms are really figurative (they even have shadows), and the pictorial field obviously is abstracted. The odd yet apt pairing results in what looks like Surrealism that could also be Zen.

This convergence of polarities springs naturally from Roxas' artistic evolution. As a youth in the 1970s he had immersed himself in the clean figuration of Social Realism, and as a student in the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts he had as mentors such prominent abstractionists as Jos Joya, Alfredo Liongoren (early exponent of figurative-abstract blend), Nestor Vinluan, Constancio Bernardo (abstraction pioneer).

Roxas' signature floating element and textured abstraction are again showcased in a show that has taken landscape as subject and theme-"Kassel," 10 large and 37 small pieces in acrylic on canvas, until March 16 in Galerie Astra, 2/F, LRI Business Plaza, 210 Nicanor Garcia St. (formerly Reposo), Bel-Air II, Makati City.

Says the exhibition note: "This show is the result of the artist's impressions, aesthetic moods and meditations on the subject of his most recent European sojourn to the small central German city of Kassel. Known among artists as the venue of the quadrennial art event Documenta, it is an otherwise quiet university town surrounded by farmlands and a landscape famous for its greenery."

Roxas was then holding a series of exhibits in Vienna and Essen, from October to November last year. He says his visit to Kassel, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of Documenta, marked a shift in his view of modern art and "how contemporary Philippine art could significantly gain by meditating on and combining with Western art in unexpected ways."

Thus, in this exhibit, we are regaled with a seamless blending of Western nonobjective abstraction and Filipino painterly tradition, plus the gestural strokes of Chinese calligraphy and the minimalism of Zen.

Witness the hyperrealist rendition of floating objects against total abstraction in such pieces as "Alone," "Cultural Differences," "Element of Broken Dreams." Or the calligraphic strokes la Cy Twombly in "Endless Sojourn."

The pieces are chiefly monochromatic, in black and white, reminding us that, when the artist visited, the green landscape of Kassel had vanished and winter was creeping in. This is celebrated in "Endless Sojourn," like a flurry of snow, and in "Winter in Kassel," like a pool of mud.

Roxas received the Jurors' Choice at the 1994 Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards, and won for nonrepresentational painting at the 1997 Art Association of the Philippines competition. A fine specimen of a painterly abstractionist.

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