The color of sky at noon, circa 2013

Riding on the MRT you could hardly guess the color of the sky, unless you look up through the air vent and surmise if among the gathering throng you hear rumors of rain.

One Wednesday noon at Ayala Museum, sometime in the year 2013, the winners of the 46th Shell National Students Art Competition (NSAC) are working on separate pieces depicting life in our islands, a hundred years hence.

“Ang gagaling ng mga bata,” Junyee, judge in the sculpture category, says as he mingles with the young, talented, upcoming artists.

The finalists came from all over the archipelago, from the northern reaches of Benguet State University, to the southern Philippine Women’s College of Davao. The kids are more than alright, the future of Philippine art is in good hands.

A clutch of winners from the different categories — oil/acrylic, watercolor, sculpture, digital arts — are on hand for the spontaneous interaction, four collaborations on canvases with paint still wet, suggesting colors of the sky in the year 2113.

The watercolor group, led by first prize winner Clint Policarpio of UE Caloocan whose “Basaan sa San Juan” gained the nod of judges led by Adi Baen Santos, has decidedly focused on a burst of yellow green, with hints of a secret life breathing underneath. Always room for optimism within the four corners of a frame, in fact likely to spill over with colors running, till the work is left to dry momentarily under the sun or let an electric fan do its silent duty.

The sculpture tandem, the one-two punch of Katrina Gosiengfiao and Carlo de Laza, both from the UP College of Fine Arts, have recreated what could be cracks in the parchment curtain, with the curtain a faded fragment from a possible vinta sail, an impressionist rendering of future time. Gosiengfiao’s prize-winning “Bukas na Lata” is in itself no mean tandem, featuring an open can beside compact intertwined human figures in resin on a plate, a different canned good.

The digital arts pair of Myra Labor and Catherine Salazar, both from Technological University of the Philippines like first placer Kyle Balagtas, pay tribute to the ancients in an angular, somewhat geometric painting that has annotations of what could be alibata. TUP may have swept the digital category but the school has not lost touch with old school painting, the basics one has to return to time and again if one is to move forward at all. Salazar, who has a namesake writer from the ’70s, won third for “Unfading Memory of Mine,” that has a crystalline mirror ball set against a dark background.

A double, back-to-back canvas marks the work of the oil/acrylic team led by first prize winner Jay Marquez of Bulacan State University, whose “Natalo Ako” wowed the panel of judges that included painter Igan D’Bayan. When Marquez and teammate explain their found collaboration, it is like you are hearing a double bass, or the struggle to be functional in an increasingly dysfunctional society. There is a “fragile” tag pasted on to canvas, as it seeks to voyage through the hypothetical decades. They lost, they won, they lost again, but art wins always.

Even those who didn’t get the top awards but were named among the 100 finalists had memorable work, to wit: Bulacan State’s Don Bunag whose ‘The Anatomy of a Promise’ is exactly that with excerpts of calligraphy; Silliman University’s Anna Marie Lacson whose “Nostalgia” evokes the rare feeling and takes the viewer back to a Dumaguete campus when life was simpler, the people gentler; University of Northern Philippines’ John Barzabal whose ‘Tanging Uniporme” makes canvas out of a clothesline and recalls Marina Cruz; and Rizal Technological University’s Diana De Vera whose ‘The Fossilized Fire” suggests lambent possibilities in a world grown cold.

You’ve heard it said that to be named finalist alone is enough to be a winner, and nowhere is this truer than in the Shell NSAC. And to hear Junyee say that these kids are good, well, that could be the understatement of the year. Not only good but mamaw.

This is perhaps most evident in “Natalo Ako,” that ambient, graphic, pulsating painting of our insides. The strangest thing is that art begins and ends in the gut, and if we are to have a chance at winning at all we must first lose everything, including any notion of the color of the sky at noon, sometime in the year 2013, or even 2113.