The sound of color and the texture of emotions

In Marlon Magbanua’s world, what is essential might be invisible to eye, but it often does not escape his ear. The sound is then amplified, tempered in his mind, and ultimately finds form in swaths of color on canvas.

I first saw one of his works, a large abstract piece of colors that refuse to be named quickly, during an opening in a group show at Whitewall Art Gallery in San Antonio Village, Makati. In an effort to name the colors — a kind of blue-green found at a point in the sea of a certain depth, at a certain time of day, plus a shock of flamboyant red in a shape that made it ironic, a square — and the mood whole collection of elements evoked, I had woven in my head snippets of memories from my childhood that, in turn, called forth scents. Scents that triggered even more memories that then fueled certain emotions. I didn’t have much time to stare at the piece, but half an hour more and I would have felt something definite. Perhaps that was the charm, that being on the verge of something but not quite getting to it, not unlike having a word slip off the tip of your tongue that you have to resort to a lot of hand gesturing to communicate meaning. When something can’t be described in a nifty phrase, it becomes more potent in sparking interesting conversation.

But the concept behind his works is clear in the artist’s mind, so clear that his explanation of it takes on a quality of a mathematical equation. At its simplest, or what little I could follow, X = Y, and Y = Z, therefore X = Z. Because of a background in engineering (he pursued it for two years at the University of Santo Tomas, and a number of his five other siblings are engineers), Magbanua is most comfortable thinking in these definite terms. The draw of his works, therefore, lies in the artist’s own acknowledgment that the world he lives in is so indefinite, so uncertain, so full of disconnect, incongruities that need a range of sense to make what little sense they can amount to.

The Iloilo-born, Cavite-based artist gave up advertising work in 2003 to paint full time, and for much of his career he has been obsessed with the visual aspects of sound and the texture of emotions. Every emotion has a corresponding sound, the artist theorizes, and every sound has a corresponding color, just as emotions carry a corresponding texture — rough, murky, light, thin or heavy. Although the concept he obsesses with follows a cerebral thread, the process of art making is pretty much instinctive.

For his upcoming solo exhibition titled “Incidents” at the Whitewall Gallery, which will gather eight to 10 of the artist’s large works, Magbanua painted one he calls “Uttering Blind Words,” inspired by his experience during one of the rare times he leaves his Cavite studio to come to the city. As he was walking along the busy streets of the Ortigas Central Business District, he saw a blind man playing the electric guitar on the sidewalk, busking for loose change. It was incongruous on a number of levels, says Magbanua: Here was a middle-aged man playing his guitar in the hopes of scraping together a small amount, a sight usually seen outside churches in gritty districts of Manila, singing a sad ballad that’s been played over and over to beerhouse-cliché status, along a sidewalk of an upscale district people by yuppies all oblivious to him.

“Lumapit ako sa kanya, tumayo sa tabi niya at pumikit kasi gusto ko malaman kung ano ang nararamdaman niya (I walked over to him, stood beside him and closed my eyes because I wanted to know what he felt),” says the artist. With his eyes closed, what emerged in his mind was an explosion of colors and forms that swelled out of his emotions, with much thanks to the busker’s music — a mix of melancholy lyrics and weeping chords (if it were a dance, it would be rumba), layered over with the weight and dreariness of daily repetition.

Although his paintings are, as he says, inspired by very specific incidents in his life, they do what abstract art does best: lay themselves open to a world of meaning. Magbanua hears the sounds, feels the emotions, and commits them to colors, textures and form. And the viewer, suitably engaged by the paintings, is compelled to summon emotions from his or her own distinct experiences that in turn summon the scents and sound.  

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“Incidents,” a solo exhibit by Marlon Magbanua, opens on May 30, 6 p.m., at the Whitewall Art Gallery, 7467 Bagtikan Street, San Antonio Village, Makati City. The show will run until June 10.