Abstract Music
by: Alice Guillermo, Sightings, Business Mirror, July 11, 2007, p.E4
The paintings of Edwin Wilwayco are an important contribution to the language of abstract art in the expressive use of color and space and in their origins in musical inspiration. They invite the viewer to embark on expeditions that he may discover to be meaningful to his life and world.
AS the artist declared in a preview of his works for a Singapore exhibit, Edwin Wilwayco’s abstract art is that which springs and follows a musical line, a progression of chords, a full symphony orchestra. Abstract art that is inspired by music is only one kind of abstraction. For such would not hold for other kinds, such as geometric, hard-edge or chromatic abstraction. An exception to this may be Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, his New York painting in which his style of grids in primary colors was meant to reflect the flashing marquees of Broadway and its lively dance rhythms during his visit to America.
Other artists would have different concerns: geometric abstraction which has measurable units obeys a mathematical rigor of a purely intellectual kind. Hard-edge abstraction has to do with a clearly legible interplay of lines and colors, while chromatic abstraction, as in Albers or Rothko, often has a scientific attitude which takes interest in the relationality of colors. Needless to say, these abstract styles can have little to do with music.
Oil on canvas 2007, 24"x 75"
Wilwayco may be closer to abstract expressionism, having been a student of Jose Joya, the country’s foremost abstract expressionist of the ’50s and ’60s before he did acrylic collages, during his college years at the University of the Philippines-College of Fine Arts. But Wilwayco, though he bears close affinities, is not an abstract expressionist in the real sense. For abstract expressionism as it was developed by Jackson Pollock and the New York School was primarily a gestural, kinetic style which placed premium on the release of physical energy in the broad, wide, spontaneous gestures of the hand, the wrist, the arm, indeed the entire body. So, for Pollock, the canvas or painting surface spread out on the floor was an arena in which he actively engaged in free, spontaneous gesture with all kinds of tools, sticks or twigs that he could lay his hands upon. Yves Klein coated his body in a particular kind of blue and rolled himself on the canvas laid on the floor. But abstract expressionism, also called kinetic or gestural painting, has primarily to do with the spontaneous release of energy through painting, with the artist leaving his physical marks and traces on the canvas.
But apart from the aspect of gestural and kinetic release, Wilwayco can be considered an abstract expressionist in the sense that primary to him is the expression of inner feeling in abstract form. Perhaps the term “lyrical abstraction” would be more suitable to his art because, rather than dealing with massive outpourings of energy, he deals with a more thoughtful and contemplative exploration of emotion in the oil medium.
Wilwayco’s previous works which won critical praise were his blue paintings in large format. In these, he used blue in a rich range of tones as his signature color. In large format, they were like subterranean explorations, sensuous meanderings outside of time and place, sometimes seeking the light and the dazzling surface of the water, at other times shunning it for darker nooks in ocean caves. These paintings would be subtly embellished with scatterings of gold dust, dream-like in the ever-shifting tides and currents of the sea or the shadows of the dense forests.
In the present group of works which he unhesitatingly entitles Scherzo, reaffirming his musical inspiration, the artist pursues the same style but opens up to the seduction of colors and their equivalents to visual form. In a way, it remotely recalls the poetry of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who discovered equivalents between the sonority and shape of the different vowels and the energy emissions of various colors. Wilwayco almost always paints to music in a studio atmosphere saturated by beautiful sound. For it is music that shapes his forms and abstract figures and determines their movements, passages, shifts and turns in space.
In general, he works in three formats: a 48x48 square format, a long horizontal format and a vertical format that recalls oriental scrolls. He composes according to the size and dimension of his work, always in oil on canvas.
The artist’s square works usually follow a color scheme of warm, adjacent colors, red, orange and yellow. They are characterized by a dense use of pigment applied liberally, giving the experience of the physical substance or matiere, which is a high point of modernism. They are at times applied in overlapping layers, although varying or contrasting tones lead the discovering eye into depths and unexpected corners. In our exploration of the virtual space, there are many marks along the way, such as scratches or grattignures, parallel traces of fine impasto, vertical or diagonal, or likewise scribbles not unlike cursory letters which may be clues or hints to the wandering viewer. Sometimes, there is a rare variation to the series as when the yellow motifs at the upper section are supported by a large bustle of green shapes, the colors complementing each other in a pleasing organic configuration.
The long horizontal paintings are of a different color scheme altogether with combinations of blue-violet and deep purple. They are like landscapes with a variety of figures, motifs, as well as shadowy passages and clearings. They contain within them direction lines that guide the viewer through their dense pathways and the eye can take pleasure in tracing the journey.
The vertical works have the same general color scheme as the square paintings, the warm hues of red, yellow and orange. Likewise, they have a rising orientation which directs the eye upward, as though they began from a low ground and sought refuge or release in a high, open space where the colors become a dazzling promise of grace or redemption, perhaps. At other times, the vertical field is treated as a flat surface with all parts coequivalent, and the highlights distributed evenly in the work. Nonetheless, the sense of music is always present in these works in different tone qualities.
The paintings of Wilwayco are an important contribution to the language of abstract art in the expressive use of color and space and in their origins in musical inspiration. They invite the viewer to embark on expeditions that he may discover to be meaningful to his life and world.
Source: http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/07112007/life04.html