Pancho Antonio at White wall Gallery: A new inspiration

There is a point in the creative process when, after a period of incubation, and fueled by inspiration, the work being produced in turn feeds the inspiration until it grows, expands, overflows, and gains even more power to inspire, until a cycle forms, gathers momentum, and, in some cases, drives the creator into a trance, into a frenzied state of artistic production.

Sculptor Pancho Antonio’s easy manner may hint little about the state he is in, but the mystifyingly large set of keys he jangles offers a peek into what is hopefully a gathering storm: “This one is to my studio,” he explains, picking one out of the tumble of metal keys enough to slow anyone down as much as heavy leg weights. Keys are hooked into latches that, in turn, latch on to bigger versions of themselves. The extraordinarily large set of keys built itself up over the years. “Each one has a story,” Antonio says of the latches and proceeds to share each one’s provenance — found somewhere, given by a friend, formerly part of something. I’m in a metaphor mood the afternoon I meet him, and the fascinating keychain becomes the metaphor for his art: where nothing is ever wasted, and that the time it takes to make it is a key ingredient. 

Antonio’s presence during a luncheon at the newly opened Whitewall Gallery in Makati’s San Antonio Village confirms that his decades-long hiatus from the art scene is definitely over. Back in 1972, at 20 years old, he held his first one-man show of freestanding brass and copper sculptures at the Pasay City office of his father, the late National Artist for Architecture Pablo Antonio. And it is to his father that he attributes an early inclination to making art.

“We had that kind of home environment where you have access to materials,” he says. “At age four, I had pens and pencils and paper.”

In 1979, the full-time artist showed solo again, this time at Sining Kamalig featuring underwater landscapes in watercolor. “But I wasn’t such a hungry kind of artist,” he recalls, perhaps with a tinge of regret, jangling his keys as if by their sound memories could return with greater ease. “I had other sources of income, and that made me lazy.” The Sining Kamalig show was his last before he retreated from the scene, but not from his art. The decades spent away from the limelight seem to have passed like a long meditative process that included collecting objects, salvaging pieces of otherwise crumbling things, and going to welding shops to piece them all together. In 2003, he finally bought his own equipment with which he could further explore possibilities in metal.

“I’m such a basurero,” he says, laughing, but it’s hardly a joke: “I pick up all these things and I bring them to my studio,” where, evidently, these discarded things get a new lease on life. What they ultimately become is another matter.

“I let the works speak for themselves,” the artist says of his abstract pieces, which, more often than not, remain untitled until his wife and daughter, herself an artist, get into a titling mood. He whips out his cell phone, riffles through the messages, and promises to find the definition of “post-modern,” a term he seems comfortable with when ascribed to his works, as supplied by a friend, Venice-based curator Sandy Palou. “Here it is: ‘fragmented, unresolved, open-ended, defies closure’.” It’s a comfortable enough description for an artist who confesses to being uncomfortable with structure, and presumably, categories.

Valuable souvenirs from this long incubation period — about 10 metal sculptures of various found objects, such as metal trusses, mounted on stone or wood, each hitting an industrial tenor — will go on show at the gallery come April 18, his first one-man show in 30 years.

Antonio’s return to exhibitions is thanks in large part to Whitewall Gallery owner Antonio Verzosa, a long-time art collector. After paying a visit to Antonio in the artist’s Antipolo home, a partnership was born, and Antonio’s show is part of a string of exhibitions that herald the new art space into the scene.

Whitewall Gallery is a space dedicated to contemporary Philippine artworks and is an offshoot of another art-focused venture by Verzosa, this time in publishing, along with art writer and publisher Eric Duldulao.

“I’ve always liked art,” says Verzosa, who had cultivated a keen and sophisticated sense for art through numerous travels as early as his 20s and who had started seriously collecting in his 30s. “But all the good works by the masters were either museums or with the first generation collectors who, because they really liked the works, weren’t selling.” Turning to contemporary Philippine art led Verzosa to collect the “major and best works” of living artists.

And the sheer amount and quality of the work currently being produced is enough inspiration for Verzosa to push contemporary Philippine art as far as he can help it go. “(It’s) now getting noticed in Asia and around the world,” he explains, an observation many others in the field echo. “I think it’s now time that our artists today are seen as equals of their contemporaries in Asia, and even in New York and other cities of Europe. We are no longer the planting rice and nipa hut nation, represented in our past art.”

The art collector in Verzosa may at times make him possessive of the works he sells, but it also inspires in him a tendency to make sure those who badly want an art piece get to own it. “There are ways,” he says encouragingly. And those who are keen on building a collection of their own have an auspicious time and place to start: on Friday, the 13th of March, Whitewall Gallery (7467 Bagtikan Street, San Antonio Village, Makati City; e-mail whitewall.ph@gmail.com) is featuring 13 works on paper by 13 young and exciting artists. If the show inspires, the creative cycle continues, and a perfect storm of Philippine art around the world is just on the horizon.