Abstract:

The received canon on the history of art in the Philippines has portrayed abstraction in modern painting as an artistic current that figured dominantly from the 1950s to the early 1960s. In the decade that followed, however, it has been critiqued as having been co-opted by the market and the State—interpreted as indexical to the dimming of the radical potential it once promised. As abstraction has been generally lodged onto the wider genus of the modern, this perceived exhaustion also came to signify the decline of local modernism in painting, a decline said to be superseded by the streams of thought and practice regarded as the contemporary. Critical of the notion of a sharp rupture between the modern and the contemporary, this paper examines the persistence of the former by examining the case of abstraction in painting during the decades in which its decline was purported to have begun. Specifically, it centers on the practices of abstraction by Marciano Galang (1945–2001) and Alfredo Liongoren (1944–2025), the discourses that stem from these, and how they responded to the violences enforced and maintained by the form of modernity that was developing in the Philippines during the time. These practices point toward complicating discourses on the notion of nation: the lack of complete congruence among its peoples, the perilous relationships it holds within and outside of its territorial bounds, and the replicative logics of empire it continues to perpetuate. By highlighting these, the article argues that abstraction did not simply decline but persisted in ways that resonate with what art historian Patrick Flores postulated as “continuing modern”: wherein the modern did not only coexist with the contemporary, but also, at times, acted as an articulation of the latter.