Mark Louie L. Lugue. 2022. “
Nuestra Señora de la Consolacion y Correa.” In Faces of Faith: Treasures of the Santiago Apostol Parish, Betis, Guagua, Pampanga. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Art Studies.
Mark Louie L. Lugue. 2022. “
Stations of the Cross.” In Faces of Faith: Treasures of the Santiago Apostol Parish, Betis, Guagua, Pampanga. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Art Studies.
Treading a formulated continuing modern framework, the study seeks to reanimate the discourse on abstraction in the field of painting in the country during the 1970s, by exploring its persistence through its continuous relationship with modernity—including how it is particularly conceived in postcolonial terms through the matrix of the nation. It attempts to surface other narratives on the stream of artistic practices, whose influential literature dominantly, but also necessarily, portrayed it in relation to the cooptation of the State. From this set of literature, a good number understandably dwell on the elusive concept of national identity, and frequently examine the art object or collectively through the oeuvre in the process. The study speculates on the potential of provisionally minimizing these tendencies as lenses in historicizing abstraction, and instead, invites an alternative entry point in examining it: as ‘practices’ that respond to and negotiate with the modernity of its time, with its various manifestations including the notion of nation, gleaned in the lens of geopolitics. The study considers the abstraction performed by Marciano Galang (b. 1945, d. 2001) prior the 1970s to furnish historical breadth to the framework; and those by Lao Lianben (b. 1948) and Glenn Bautista (b. 1947, d. 2014) during the focal decade of study. Writing on these practices, it doubles as an attempt to further make sense of how abstraction coexisted with the slippery concept of the contemporary, revisiting the latter’s critiques against the former, most especially abstraction’s supposed exhaustion.