Abstraction as Silent Language
By Cid Reyes
As one of the Philippine’s first abstractionists, Edwin Wilwayco raises the conundrum of the subject matter in an idiom which came into existence by virtue of its repudiation of the natural world. Kandinsky, pioneer of abstraction, extolled an art that did not depend on images of the real world. He spoke of an “inner necessity” that must be assuaged and satisfied not by representational elements but by the emotive power of colors, lines, forms and space: “Houses and trees made hardly any impression on my thoughts. I used the palette knife to speak lines and splashes of paint on the canvas, and make them sing as loudly as I could. My eyes were filled with the strong saturated colors of the light and air of Munich, and the deep thunder of its shadows.” Abstraction, therefore, became the liberating force in one of art history’s most crucial moments.
But the issue of the subject matter did not resolve itself. The disruption caused by the Second World War engendered a profound crisis. After the war, a group of artists, America, banded together which henceforth became known as the New York School. In a despairing voice, the American painter Adolph Gottlieb remarked: “The situation was so bad that I know I felt free to try anything, no matter how absurd it seemed.” Another artist, Robert Motherwell, identified what was missing in art: “The need is for felt experience—intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.” Together with other artists—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, et.—they evolved a style of painting that was named Abstract Expressionism. In the now famous essay “Getting Inside the Canvas,” the critic Harold Rosenberg felt the pulse of the moment: “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
The impact of Abstract Expressionism was global, stimulating artists from all over the world. Like Cubism, it inspired variants of the idiom even as the act of painting itself became an inexhaustible wellspring for the expression of human experience.
Despite its distance from the major Western art centers, the Philippines was introduced to Abstract Expressionism, largely through its most ardent adherent, the late Jose Joya, now posthumously declared National Artist. As a professor at the state university in the sixties, Joya inspired a young generation of artists who were introduced to the tenets and dynamics of Abstract Expressionism. One of his students was Edwin Wilwayco, who immediately embraced the idiom almost as a leap of faith. Wilwayco’s early forays into painting did not quite shake off the presence of the subject. Among his first subjects were the Philippine flag (“watawat”), the national mode of transport (“jeepney”) and the Bird of Paradise. No absolute break with figuration was made and yet his handling of paint as material was decidedly gestural, his brushstrokes animated by drips and smears, clotted pigments and charged slashes of discordant colors. In these early paintings, the subject was a convenient scaffold for the impacted delineation of fragmented elements: the fold and creases of a draped flag, the decorative accouterments of a pop vehicle, the fan-like heliconian leaf-shades. For the Birds of Paradise series, Wilwayco’s colors were vermilion reds and oranges, royal magentas, shimmering yellows, while in the cool shade of the spectrum, the artist nurtured sour lemon yellows and viridian greens. Eventually, Wilwayco transposed these voluminous shapes into the three-dimensional structure of paneled screens. Now more fully expansive, the Bird of Paradise screens gave ample proof of the artist’s sculptural temperament. Wilwayco achieved the modulation of space and void with no dilution of the lush and steamy flora, bristling with their blade-like leaf-shapes. Spatial illusion wedded to a panoply of petaled plumes, all neatly contoured, engage the viewer’s eyes in a celebration of nature’s sinuous forms. A gallery exhibiting these preeming Oriental screens was transformed instantly into a luxuriant hothouse.
Ever alert for the quickening stimulus of a new subject, Wilwayco, in a meditative mood, pondered on the emotive qualities of a favored color—blue. In life and in art, the color blue is rife with significance. The early Greeks, who related the four elements to colors, chose blue to represent air and therefore, a symbol of summer. The Romantic artists assigned colors to the four temperaments: optimistic, melancholic, phlegmatic and choleric. Blue is phlegmatic: slow and stolid. In Christian symbolism, blue is the color of Divine Light, while in Hindu India, blue is the color of the god Krishna. In the Egyptian world, blue signified fertility.
Upon this pronounced and rich symbolism of blue did Wilwayco anchor his next series of works titled, aptly enough, Blues. Propelled by a vigorous vivacity, the artist created a magisterial suite of works, where shades of deepest blues, streaked with bituminous blacks, swirl in a maelstrom of slashing brushstrokes. Thick encrusted impastoes of blues thrust out from the canvas surface into pigmented relief, evoking a sensation akin to a spirit caught, by turns, in ecstatic transport and intense pain
To depend on the weight of one color alone in order to communicate man’s spiritual yearning was a gamble on Wilwayco’s part. To transcend the intensity of the color blue and equate its luminosities with the quivering states of mind, was the task which the artist sought to achieve. Indeed, this challenge lies at the very core of Expressionism: how to translate the contortions of paint matter into an instrument for emotional catharsis.
While without a doubt, Wilwayco intended the Blues works as religious paintings, the succeeding group of works, Exaltation and Moving Mountain, vividly extol the religious experience, indeed, of the Sublime. In this pursuit, Wilwayco intuited what the British artist Ben Nicholson once inspiredly remarked: “As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realization of infinity—an idea which is complete, with no beginning, no end, and therefore giving to all things for all time.
In the twin series titled Excelsis and Transcendence, the artist elicits a rapturous yearning for the Divine. Indeed, the titles from this series acknowledge spiritual longings and aspirations. Glory to the Highest,Taming the Tempest, Blossoming Radiance, Intense Musings, Seduction of the Muses. For these works, Wilwayco opted for white as the dominant “color,” as if impelled by a statement of a German artist: The state of white may be understood as a prayer; its articulation may contain a spiritual experience.
Correlating nature with faith, thus affirming the awesome power of belief, lies at the essence of the Moving Mountains series. Indeed, mountains are sites of holy aspirations. There was Mount Sinai, where Moses communed with God and received the Commandments. In Mount Tabor, Christ was transfigured with Moses and Elijah. Finally, there was the altar of the Crucifixion—Mount Calvary.
Interestingly, there was a mountain made famous by art, Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Ax-en-Provence in the south of France. For 23 years, Cezanne painted this monumental landscape in numerous canvases as the Imperturbable Presence, a metaphor for the Unknowable God.
In the next major series of Wilwayco, the artist sought inspiration from the art of pure feeling—music. That famous quotation from critic-philosopher Walter Pater—“All the arts aspire to the condition of music’—find effective affirmation in Wilwayco’s “Homage to Vivaldi.” In particular, the artist paid tribute to The Four Seasons, which is a set of four violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi, composed in 1723. A glory of Baroque music, it is immensely popular with the contemporary audience. Faithful to the mood of the season, Wilwayco’s “concerto-paintings” capture not only the appropriate colors, but also the descriptive sonnets which Vivaldi himself wrote to accompany his piece. Thus: “Springtime is upon us. The birds celebrate her return with festive song, and murmuring streams are softly caressed by the breeze.” Summer: “Under a hard Season, fired up by the Sun/Languishes the flock and burns the pine/We hear the Cuckoo’s voice, then sweet songs of the turtle dove and finch are heard.” Autumn: “Celebrates the peasant, with songs and dances./ The pleasures of a bountiful harvest.” Winter: “Shivering, frozen mid the frosty snow in biting, stinging winds; running to and fro to stamp one’s feet, teeth chattering in the bitter chill.”
Of Edwin Wilwayco, a critic once wrote: “His unstinting abstraction has avoided repetitiveness and predictability by two avenues: depth and breadth. The former shows the artist’s evolving maturity and dynamically deepening sensibility. The latter evinces his artistic integrity through tireless exploration of mediums, shapes and forms.”
In the language of abstraction, Wilwayco continues to eradicate the image in order to extract a vision of pure feeling, before which the viewer can only be stunned into silence.