Fernando Sena, or Nanding, as he is more familiarly known, picked up colors rather indiscriminately, discarding for the time being his formal grounding on color harmony, and proceeded to capture what he simply sees during the very act of painting. Ergo, his canvases were generously coated with magentas, chartreuses, tangerines, pinks, yellows, greens, reds, blues, and a host of other hues in various tints and gradated tones.
For his latest outing, Sena gathered a collection of paintings of toys he had done from 2002 to early this year and titled his exhibition simply as Toys.
The oil and acrylic paintings on canvas could technically be classified as still lifes, or what the French refer to as nature morte, parallel to the Dutch term still-leven. To this day, Sena stands proud as the painter exemplar when it comes to still life painting. In his works, the golden age of the bodegón years of Emilio Alvero, Zosimo Dimaano and Alfonso Ongpin are exquisitely relived.
It is to the credit of Sena that in his still lifes, he does not only showcase his by now recognized and masterful skill in capturing external reality with such cogent and compelling concinnity. He goes beyond such virtuosity by invoking nuggets of local customs and traditions, as when he paints the popular Filipino breakfast fare, the great leveler pan de sal with all its crumbs scattered on the table, or clothing ordinary objects, such as toys with personal or historical embellishments.
True to the tradition of still life painting, Sena’s works are representations of inanimate objects of the day-to-day world for their own sake that are seemingly devoid of any symbolic representation or hierarchical function.
In the current exhibition, Sena’s still lifes immediately caught the eye. The toys as depicted were not arranged in a formal composition customarily laid on a table to allow that artist to render them in the usual positive-negative space continuum. In Sena’s works, the toys were strewn all over the place, filling out the entire pictorial space that there is a mingling of, instead of a distinguishing between, positive and negative spaces.
When one views the works from a distance, the impression he gets is an abstract representation of space that has been perceived through and fragmented in colors. It is only when one gets closer to the works that he realizes the images are of toys. He gamely starts to label them, and look for things that he or she may have played as a child.
The overall impact at a quick glance is a horror vacui sensation. The canvases burst with images of playthings – stuffed toys, dolls, robots, transformers, convertible toys, meal toys, electronic toys, motorized toys, building blocks, toy cars and trucks, et al. – captured in all randomness, not to say artlessness.
Some in fact are broken, probably due to the wear and tear of these toys from constant use. The inclusion of such odds and ends indicated for the viewer that the toys have been played with at one point or another. The toys reflect ownership, and therefore tell a personal story. The toys, though inanimate, are so animated with narrative content. In their own muted ways, they too, have a life.
The question that pops out then is, why toys? What can be the all-absorbing, if not gripping, reason for Sena to pick toys as a theme for an exhibition? What has compelled the artist to focus his eye for detail on toys?
It is when these aspects are factored in that Sena’s works begin to take on an emblematic posture.
As Sena himself admits it, toys may not only constitute as an engaging theme for still lifes, but more than that, they can be "good for the heart."
The paintings provided Sena the welcome venue to channel his expertise on the art form he knows so well, and in the course, overcome the feeling of forlornness he has been going through since the demise of his wife, Nancy, in 1998.
For five years now, Sena has been acting as a single parent to two young boys, Oddin, now 13, and Roald, 7. Both his sons show encouraging inclinations towards art, that oftentimes, Sena allows them to interact with him whenever he is working at his art.
It was in one of these sessions that Sena started toying with the idea of painting toys. Fortunately, his late wife had kept the toys of their two boys, some of them are now almost 13 years old, and stacked them neatly in multi-decked plastic cabinets.
The assortment has revealed to Sena the wonderful world of toys with their infinitesimal colors, shapes, forms and textures. Immediately, Sena seized the potentials this vast family collection could provide his art making. Harnessing them in his art enables Sena to attend to two roles – those of painting and parenting – at the same.
Bringing the toys out of the closet again, scattering them on the floor, and painting them provided the immense opportunity for father and sons to bond closely together. At this point in Sena’s life, he values his sons as much as he does his art.
The still life paintings on exhibition were more than a brag showcase of Sena’s technical dexterity as a painter, that is bringing the art form into a fresh pictorial construct where objects, in this case, toys, can function as the principal image just as they could also be ingeniously subsumed in the background. But more than that, through them, Sena advanced that his art subscribes to a loftier aim – that his still life paintings need not simply be cold depictions of inanimate forms, but can be moving expressions to make art always in the service of life.