Mabini art shows its true colors
Revisiting Mabini makes a roll call of notable Mabini artists from all three generations, including Cesar Amorsolo Sr., Cesar Buenaventura, Roger San Miguel, Oscar Ramos Apuli, Rafael Arenillo Cusi and Emmanuel S. Nim. The book’s piece-de-resistance, however, is about Francisco “Paco” Gorospe Sy (who signed his work as Paco Gorospe). Why he is made as a focusing lens of this book could be credited to three factors. First, even if he belonged to the second generation of Mabini artists, he was one of the street’s loyal denizens (re-building his gallery twice after being engulfed in fire), making him a credible witness to and an active participant in Mabini’s history. Second, he was willfully eclectic and prolific, playing around with trends and figurations and not sticking with one particular style. He was a micro-Mabini Street all by himself, metaphorically speaking. Third, after his death in 2002, one can now make an objective appraisal of his work and contribution to Philippine visual arts.
Born on July 10, 1939 in Binondo, Manila, Gorospe was largely a self-taught artist, even if having spent a term as a student at the Fine Arts department of University of Santo Tomas. Initially, he worked with crayons and watercolors but found out that he could best express himself in oil. After getting married and having four kids, he founded his gallery in Mabini in the ‘60s, forging what is now referred to as the Mabini Triumvirate, the two artists being Roger San Miguel and Francisco Ello.
Prof. Paul Blanco Zafaralla, Ph.D., respected art historian and critic, sums up the Gorospe visual vocabulary as such: “For 45 years (1957-2002), Gorospe fixed his eyes, mind and heart on at least 11 different subjects, in various media and styles. The subjects…were the following: people, fowls, fishes, animals, landscapes, riverscapes, abodes, still-lifes, climate, industrialization, religion.” Gorospe, Zafaralla adds, was at home with “realism, cubism, abstraction. He used the styles of some Western and Filipino artists as take-off points for his deconstruction of the subjects whose pictorial units are taken as metaphors.”
Though they are metaphorical as they come, Gorospe’s works, especially his figures, are full-bloodied, alive, inflected with the immediacy of animate objects. His coloration, trumpeted as his main achievement, renders a multi-dimensionality to his paintings (he was not called as the “Picasso of the Philippines” for nothing), as though they are transpiring, at once, in the realm of sense and spirit. They are undeniably painterly. They are pieces whose main subject is beauty, broken through the prism of seductive forms. His portraits of the natural world, especially, are beckoning.
Text part of article published Monday, June 24th, 2013 by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
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