Carating comes full circle

Lito Carating recently opened an exhibit at the Hiraya Art Gallery. Carating is back in full harness doing what he does best: large works in metallic acrylic on linen canvas. The exhibit follows his café show at Cena in Greenbelt Makati last year featuring small works on paper.

But what separates the November show in Hiraya from the last time he had an exhibition of works on canvas entitled Alma Matters held in the Corredor at the UP College of Fine Arts in February 2004 is that his works have become even bigger. The UP show last year carried the signature "Sanctuary," all of 6 x 12 feet; in the Hiraya show, the work to see is "Refuge," all of 7 x 14 feet.

Metallic acrylic of copper, gold and bronze are mixed with cobalt blue, red and orange done in the non-representational idiom, or what is commonly referred to as abstract art.

Carating intimated that his Cena show last year was just a lull before the storm because he would be doing much larger works soon. The "soon" he was then referring to has finally come to the Hiraya show, which runs until December.

Carating has always enjoyed painting on canvas. This does not mean, however, that he limits himself to canvas as ground. In the more than four decades that he has been painting, he has worked on quite a number of surfaces, notably paper and lawanit boards.

But there is no denying that on canvas, Carating’s colors are subtler, his images more exquisite. The frenzy tactile textures that he used to apply and impose on lawanit are also gone. In their stead, minimal textural incisions surface, yet they retain the same pictorial quality and richness, displaying a mature handling of technique, all undeniable proof that Carating is the master of his chosen medium.

It is time to say goodbye to those actual bold textures and say hello to new visual experiences. Hence, for the Hiraya show, Carating has incorporated the circle to grace his almost rectilinear and grid-like weft and warp texturing. Suddenly, a big solitary circle appears in his work. The dimension is staggering as it occupies almost three quarters of the pictorial space, positioned in the very center of the composition.

In very certain terms, the Carating circle is a strong visual presence.

Carating has come full cycle in his repertoire of images. Joining his lines, squares and rectangles is the symbol of infinity itself, the circle.

The awesome dimension that Carating assigns to the geometric shape reveals the importance the artist attaches to the classical symbol. It is definitely an allusion to the two celestial bodies that govern man’s concept of time, the sun and the moon, as exemplified in the titles of the paintings, "Sunset, Sunrise," "Red Sun No. 1," "Red Sun No. 2," and Moon Rising No. 2."

That the motif repeats several times is no accident. It is quite a deliberate image, harking back to a visual possibility sparked by a work entitled "Sleepless," which he submitted for a group show at Pinto Art Gallery also last year. The work carried a blue linear outline of the circle, hardly recognizable as a visual image or audible as an artistic statement. But the germ of the idea was nonetheless sown. The Hiraya Gallery is the richer for being the venue to present these markings in Carating’s continuing artistic odyssey.