Pinoy art awardees bond at The Bund

Forty-one-year-old Augusto E. Elopre is from Dapitan but has stayed the last 13 years in Baguio City, where he recalls that he was once too shy to approach an artist of national caliber. Now his works are on exhibit at the BenCab Museum, as part of Cordillera artists’ produce. Besides that honor, he’s hit it really big.

A couple of years ago, “DoodsK” as he likes to call himself was so hard up he couldn’t purchase art materials, so he hit upon the idea of collecting chicken feathers and pressing them to a canvas for a visual representation of a concocted narrative. He had to ask his folks in Dapitan to send him additional bags of chicken feathers. His Baguio neighbors were amused, perhaps even wondered if he was turning shamanic.

DoodsK labored on the canvas for 18 months. It showed an old lady in bed, her eyes transfixed in seeming terror. Her white hair flows, and there appear to be cobra hood shapes around her head. She is a woman of terrible black power, able to render pain and death to people she touches with a malign hand. But now she is nearing her own end, and wishes to transmit her occult gift to her children. Four hands rise up in the foreground, refusing the inheritance. Other sections of the large work (199.5 cm x 184 cm) display various other applications of nativist lore.

Elopre submitted what he titled “The End of the Black In-Hear-Itance” (hand-compressed feathers on canvas) to the prestigious national contest, the Philip Morris-sponsored Philippine Art Awards for 2010. And he won the Grand Prize worth P350,000. Now he says he can buy oil and acrylic, but only after improving his family’s home in Baguio. 

Our most notable art critic, Cid Reyes, one of the contest judges, writes of Elopre’s winning entry: “All too rarely does one encounter an artwork that stops one in his tracks, gripped by its mesmeric power. One such work is... Elopre’s ‘The End...’ Whence such hypnotic appeal, at once puzzling and enthralling, unnerving and mystifying? This is art-making that is equivalent to a virtuosic star turn. Suffice it to say that the felicitous combination of subject (drawn from the dark lore of nativist beliefs, rife with evil and tribulation) and unexpected material (chicken feathers) is potent.”

The Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards winners enjoy their last night in Shanghai, replete with a grand view of The Bund all a-glitter.

Together with Reyes in the judging panel were National Artist Bencab, renowned artists Nestor Vinluan, Julie Lluch and Jose Tence Ruiz, previous PAA Grand Prize winner Maria Victoria Albano, author-editor Sonia P. Ner, UP Fine Arts Dean Tina Colayco, Lopez Memorial Museum director Mercedes Lopez Vargas, and UP Vargas Museum curator Patrick Flores.

They went through hundreds of entries from all over the Philippines, and selected 10 winners each for the four regional classifications that were Metro Manila, Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. Each of these regional winners received P40,000. Their works are still on exhibit at the National Museum.

Five works were then selected for the Jurors’ Choice Awards of Excellence, worth P120,000 each, and an additional two winners for the Jurors’ Choice Award of Merit at P80,000 each. Elopre bagged the Grand Prize. 

The Awards of Excellence went to Rodelio “Toti” Cerda, Joey Cobcobo, Marvin Chito Natural, Dexter Sy and Rodney Yap, while Maximino Balatbat II and Crispin Villanueva Jr. took the Merit awards.

A grand bonus for the eight winners was an all-expense-paid trip to Shanghai, one of the fastest growing art centers in Asia. They were accompanied by PMFTC Inc.’s director for corporate affairs Bayen Elero and public affairs and communications manager Chita Laysa-Herce, as well as Kat Tungol and Ines Artadi of the PAA secretariat. 

Chris Nelson, president of PMFTC Inc. and managing director of PMPMI or Philip Morris Philippine Manufacturing Inc., flew in to join us on the last day and host an elegant dinner at the posh M on The Bund, where the nighttime view from the terrace was spectacular.

“Bonding at The Bund,” the prizewinning artists merrily described their four-day experience of Shanghai, which was highlighted by a full day’s walkabout at the World Expo, where the long queues to each pavilion didn’t deter the enterprising bunch from applying their Pinoy skills in gaining quick entry.

Zeroing in on some Pinoy Expo staffers, they managed to have themselves skip the long lines and be ushered through some pavilions’ exit doors. Oh, how they enthused over the Russian pavilion with its storehouse of beauties they would have wanted to ask to model in live drawing sessions. 

The older Puxi area’s skyline at daytime also heralds cosmopolitan Shanghai.

Intermittent rain didn’t dampen spirits either, as the Group of Eight jauntily picked up disposable umbrellas and formed a chorus line to weather the suddenly nippy conditions.

The rather hectic itinerary also included visits to the Shanghai Museum and a couple of contemporary arts museums and galleries, where the artists noted similar trends of dynamic Asian art a-borning. And the verdict was that the Filipino visual artist remains a leading exponent.

Max Balatbat, for instance, has been on a roll of late, also winning this year in the AAP competition as well as the GSIS contest’s grand prize, both for abstract art. In December, he will participate in the Florence Biennale. His PAA winning work, “Avenida Karnabal,” appears as a simulated grid-like collage of architectural details.

Cris Villanueva, the oldest in the group, won the PAA Grand Prize in 2005 and a Juror’s Choice for Excellence in 2006. This month of October, he mounts his 10th one-man show at the Nova Gallery in Makati.

Toti Cerda had his third solo show last year. He has joined the PAA competition four times, and also came away with an award for Excellence in 2005. He was so impressed with what he saw in Shanghai, exclaiming that he found the art scene better than in Singapore.

Joey Cobcobo, 27, of Metro Manila, joined the PAA contest for the first time. His fourth solo show is scheduled for November at Avellana Art Gallery. A Bible Baptist, he is a member of the Highland 8 group, as he is half-Igorot.

Marvin Natural’s oil-on-canvas titled “The Filipino Art of Problem-Solving” looks semi-abstract until one notes that it’s a representation of the Philippine archipelago, with Mindanao cropped off and Palawan skewed somewhat from its natural position. It speaks of migration routes, the Cebuano artist explained, even as a bamboo slat bisects the canvas to suggest the typical band-aid solution to our problems.

Dexter Sy, 30, of Metro Manila, was a three-time PAA finalist before he cracked the Top Five roster. He has participated in a two-man show in Utterly Gallery in Singapore, and will have his second solo show at the Kaida Gallery this month. 

Rodney Yap of Davao, 36, was also a Mindanao finalist in 2007. His works are currently on exhibit at Museo Davaoeño. His winning work incorporates text in the form of quotations from poet Anna Akhmatova, Kahlil Gibran, Bob Dylan and others, along with his own poetry.

Truly a talented, nay, gifted bunch these guys are. A pity by the way that not a single female artist made it to this year’s Top Eight, albeit Camille dela Rosa, daughter of my late lamented buddy Ibarra, was one of the Metro Manila finalists for a freshly evolved phantasmagoric work.

Maybe the Philippine pavilion at the Shanghai Expo should just have exhibited these artists’ works in place of what our fellow Philippine STAR columnist Wilson Lee Flores has decried as the tiangge-like environment that we have there now. I noticed however that the Chinese public that entered our pavilion, especially the youngsters, gravitated towards a section that featured the works of our film animators.

It just goes to show how the visual arts have certainly become one of our strengths as a highly creative people of cutting-edge caliber.

Chris Nelson has articulated on the burgeoning wealth of Philippine art:

“We believe that the Philippine Art Awards do not only enliven the visual arts community, but also contribute to the discovery and recognition of emerging or sometimes hidden artistic talents of the Filipinos. Philip Morris, together with our partners from the public as well as private sectors in the different parts of the country... has provided an effective platform for our Filipino artists to be recognized as a major player in the fast-growing creative industry not only locally but all over Asia as well.”

Indeed. To the Philippine Art Awards winners, a rousing Mabuhay! Shanghai and elsewhere, here we come, and conquer.