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"For a painter perhaps the most striking thing about the Philippines is the
quality of light. Normally we have to deal with the white colorless glare that
bounces off every surface and refuses to cast a shadow. Somewhere else I have
written that it is like looking at a naked light bulb. The implications of this
kind of light to painters are legion, because although a painter may not paint what he
sees, his surroundings condition what he paints. An example: Hernando Ocampo's
juxtaposition of contrasting colors in their maximum intensities. His pictures do not
glow. They glare. It is precisely this quality that gives them, in my eyes, their
peculiar Philippine flavor.
A favorite question here: "Is there a Philippine style?" My answer is that I suppose
so; it is probably being created right now. However, the chances are that a whole
generation will have to pass before this quality can be clearly recognized. Right
now we are conscious of the differences between one artist and the next. Someday the
similarities will become apparent. We recognize the obviously "Spanish" in artists
as different as Zurbaran and Goya. That took a good deal of time, though."
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Born in Manila on 27 August 1924. Fernando Zobel is a true aesthete who lived in the world of museums and art history. Of music, poetry and literature.
He was happiest when, sketchbook on hand, he could be with the Masters in a museum, carrying a visual dialogue,
by sketching, revising and creating his own version of what he saw. He paid homage to the Masters while he also somehow,
negated them.
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He had a compulsion to draw. He was delighted to be able to sketch during concerts although he confessed that when he painted
he required absolute silence. For him drawing was a way of capturing gesture, not motion, but that relationship between inert
and dynamic lines. It was also his way of seeing. A friend of his actually tried to count his drawings and gave up after
ten thousand.
For him, painting was the result of a well-rehearsed act, like a concert or recital, or an athletic tournament, except
of course, athletic was his weakest point. His paintings were well rehearsed, well planned, with hundreds of sketches, drawings,
plans and sometimes photographs. Yet the actual painting could be completed in four or five sessions. And the work almost always
exuded an air of freshness, of spontaneity, like a passage played con brio by a violin virtuoso.
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Like Michelangelo who looked at sculpture as a matter of freeing the figure imprisoned in a marble. Zobel regarded painting as a sort
of distillation—of removing distractions—painting a landscape by removing everything that distracted its sense of form, from roads,
houses to even color. He wanted to pare down his work to its most abstract, underlying structure.
He hefted lines and masses, tensions and movements, the way a chemist measured compounds.
He constructed the scaffoldings, the plans, the grids for his paintings the way an architect would have made plans. Yet,
he was never the slave of any system or formula. He shunned labels the way he avoided bombast.
While all these set him apart from his contemporaries, his works continued to gain wide acceptance. He exhibited regularly in Madrid,
Manila, and also at Bertha Schaefer in New York where in one exhibition, New York's Museum of Modern Art purchased one work for its collection.
Yet as late as 1960, the American art critic Natalie Edgar discussed the new Spanish school and failed—perhaps luckily—to
mention Zobel.
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Zobel was actually painting against his time, particularly against the Abstract-Expressionists.
Zobel sketched, made drawings, planned.
They painted directly, without preliminary drawings, and improvised.
Zobel abstracted from something seen.
Their gestures, their brushmarks, their pigment—all those were their subject.
He painted subdued, whispering and contemplative pieces.
They thrived on rhetorics, the scream and the shock of the moment.
He invited a kind of detached meditation, a pure aesthetic joy.
They courted visceral reactions, the gutting of the audience.
Zobel did not mind being out of the mainstream. He considered it boring to be lumped in a box. Urbane,
witty and, yes, noble, he had a Yo El Rey stance about his painting which kept his works not only
unique but above all, possessed with ineffable composure.
His realm had its gate at Harvard but its geography included all of his past and extended to the present.
And the future. Perhaps.
(* taken from Fernando Zobel by Dr. Rod. Paras-Perez)
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Lopez Memorial Museum » Art Galleries: Modernists — Fernando Zobel
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