ROMULO OLAZO:DIAPHANOUS ANTHURIUMS

Romulo Olazo

Diaphanous-Anthuriums

Anthuriums: Fever for Flowers
by Cid Reyes

"With their open, heart-shaped flowers and tropical disposition, it's no wonder that anthurium have come to symbolize hospitality. Also known as the Flamingo Flower, Boy Flower, Painted Tongue and Painter Palette ---because of their distinctive shape and color --- the name anthurium comes from a Greek word, meaning 'tail flower'. Exotic and compelling, with bold, typically red flowers and shiny dark green foliage, anthurium, like the hospitality they represent, are long-lasting and irresistibly beautiful."

Teleflora: Fresh Flower hand delivered daily

"I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move", thus declared Georgia O'Keefe, the boldest and the most innovative flower painter in America. Stupefying as that statement may sound, O'Keefe painted flowers in large scale and in magnified closed up, lending them an abstract quality. In their monumentality, her flower painting achieved a level of spiritual transcendence.

Flower painting in West flourished in the seventeenth century in Holland, in the hand of Ambrosius Bosschaert, Balthasar van der Ast and Roelandt Savery. Not only in painting but also in decorative arts.Wrote Anna Pavort, author of "Flower Power":"Flower flamed in stained glass,curled round the bowls of porringers and wassail cups. They were stitched into bed hangings, tapestries and curtains, wove into the borders of Flemish tapestries, or arranged in bouquets which often to have been copied from flower paintings.

Great painters were enamored with flowers, which they depicted with ardor and affection and in a multiplicity of variations. Van Gogh is practically associated with sunflowers although he painted several irises, too. Claude Monet's obsession with flowers can be seen in his gardens in Giverny, located just outside of Paris, where he resided with his family. In Monet's garden are to be found dahlias,geraniums roses and gladioli, which all appeared in profusion in his floral still lifes. Monet lamented his "poor palettes" which could not capture the full chromatic radiance of the real flowers. He is of course, most famous for his painting of waterlilies, which he also grew in his garden pond. Henri Matisse the Fauvist artist always included flowers in his paintings. He said, "there are always flowers for those who want to see them." The Pop artist Andy Warhol scored his greatest commercial success with his silkscreen paintings of hibiscus (gumamela) blossoms.

Filipino artist are, of course, not immune to the seduction of flowers. whether as still lifes or as decorative elements in domestic interiors, flowers bloom in the brilliantly painted canvases of representational of figurative artists. To be sure, flowers are the last thing one would find in the works of abstract artists. How then did an abstractionist maestro such as Romulo Olazo fall in love with subject of flowers?

In T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," regarded as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, there is a passage that describes a man bringing a bunch of hyacinths to the women he loves. Years later, the woman wistfully remember the incident: "You give me Hyacinths a year ago. They called me the Hyacinths girl."

When it was the man's turn to remember that incident, he said:"--Yet when we come back, late, from the Hyacinths garden./ Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak and my eyes failed, I was waiting  / living nor dead, and I knew nothing / Looking into the heart of light, the silence."

That passage and imagery seem appropriate when recalling the time when the artist Romulo Olazo, having arrived from a Saturday Group painting session at the Flower Farm in Tagaytay, brought to his wife Patricia an armful of flowers. In this case, not hyacinths but anthuriums.

For a purely cinematic scene, that incident should be filmed with a misty lens, romantically accompanied by the swelling of violins.

As it turned out for the Olazo couple, more anthuriums arrived at their residence a few days later, compliment of the Flower Farm. It was as if the Flower Farm had intuited Olazo's attraction for anthuriums, thereby accidentally, if indirectly paving the way for another theme in the art of Olazo.

Previously, Olazo, had painted a series of works on the subject of Kasuy (cashew). Essentially an abstract artist,l Olazo had made a name for himself with his long-running "Diaphanous" series. It is an art of luminosity, achieved through the application of several layers of geometric "stenciled" shapes. While the "kasuy" paintings were a departure from his abstraction, Olazo nonetheless treated the shape with his signature "Diaphanous" technique.

So, too, with the anthurium paintings. At first, the subject was executed realistically as a floral still life. Soon the anthuriums were rendered as a "Diaphanous," flattened but still retaining its distinctly recognized heart shape.

Was it by serendipity that Olazo chanced upon the shape-the heart-that enticed and trilled him? Dispensing with the geometric shapes of circle, square, the triangle, the most vividly recognizable shape is that of the heart. It is the most evocatively emotional shape with the singular power to suggest, evoke and symbolize the universal emotion of love. (Indeed, the heart-shape has become the graphic emblem of the greatest city in the world, New York. Paris , on the other hand, has to content itself with the label City of Love.)

The assigned color for the anthurium is, of course, blood-red, for that fluid of life coursing through veins. Olazo's aesthetic, however, disregards with his chromatic convention. The artist animates the shapes with a variety of colors, such as pinks, turquoise, leafy greens. In the instance of the present suite of works, the artist opted to use whites. The base or background colors, such as tan, sienna, sky blues, mossy greens, are not a passive field but are involved in intensifying the contours of the anthurium form.

In all the works, the spikes are unfailingly defined in seething red and are deployed by the artist as an activating agent. Like a spangle of accents, the spikes, which in fact differentiate the anthurium form other flowering plants, teasingly swim into view, seemingly dispersed at random but in an order that cumulatively inflects the stun of heart-shapes.

Altogether, this recent collection of anthurium paintings derives from the compositional format enforced in the "Kasuy" series. Based on an internal radiation of light that emanates from the first layer of anthurium "screen." each painting then is an expressive nuance, in organic form, of the classic Diaphanous paintings. The conflation of a representational theme and a deeply entrenched and perfected abstract style is what lends a refreshing thrill to Olazo's continually evolving art. It is worth recalling that way back in the seventies Olazo did some graphic works that use the image of the heart. Appropriately, he gave them the evocative title "Corazon." As with the "kasuy," Olazo realized the potency of the anthurium as pure form. Its providential heart shape is itself a valentine that was proffered to him on that Saturday Group painting session at the Flower Farm. When the artist then brought home an armful of anthurium and represented them to his wife Patricia, the correspondence between love and art acquired a dimension that needed a manifest expression. These anthurium paintings are the progeny of that felicitous moment.

For American artist Georgia O'Keefe, flowers may merely be a convenient substitute for a model that does not move. For Romulo Olazo, the anthurium was the favored flower that moved him emotionally. This exhibition of his latest anthurium paintings proves that the fever for flowers has not abated.

Romulo Olazo
Diaphanous-Anthuriums

October 12 to 25, 2012
ArtistSpace, Ayala Museum
Makati Avenue corner De la Rosa St.
Makati City, Philippines