The Sound of Wilwayco
By Lito B. Zulueta
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Monday, October 22, 2007
The abstracts illustrate not so much the psychology of music as its synaesthetic impact.
Edwin Wilwayco's music-inspired abstraction assumes a lively but hardly light-hearted tenor in “Scherzo,” a suite of oil works that will be displayed at Serendra in Taguig starting tonight and in Singapore next month.
After last year's “Silent Music” and “Homage to Vivaldi,” both shows inspired by the music of the Venetian musician of the late Renaissance, it is perhaps expected of Wilwayco to expand his musical taste as to take on other composers as well. In the new show therefore are works inspired by the musical movements from concertos by such renowned composers as Chopin, Schubert, Haydn, Dvorak, Mendelssohn and Stravinsky.
The focus of the show is on the scherzo, which is the third (or sometimes second) movement in a symphony or string quartet. The word is derived etymologically from the Italian and means literally jest or joke. Wilwayco's art of course is hardly jocular and his sensibility does not usually take to ribaldry or even mild humor. Therefore, the “Scherzo” here recreates the movement which is basically the liveliest of three movements, demonstrating an abounding vitality.
Wilwayco approximates all of this critical, imperative spirit through lines, colors, and, as Alice Guillermo in her notes to the Singapore exhibit shows, in the sizes of the canvases. Generally, Wilwayco works in three canvases–a square canvass (48x48), a long horizontal format and a vertical format.
Depending on the formats, Wilwayco employs a color scheme that goes from warm to heartfelt (the contiguous colors of red, orange and yellow) in the case of square and vertical works, and that goes from passionate to severe (the deep colors of blue and violet) in the case of horizontal works.
The strokes in the square and vertical works show a density as far as the application of pigments and their overlaying are concerned. The materiality of the hues runs counter to the purity of music that Wilwayco and abstractionists like him try to approximate; however daunting the challenge, the artist is able to marry the ineffable and the material. He achieves the feat by his bold strokes that leaves marks-scratches, impastos, and even gratings-of their movements, like hastily written musical notes by a composer running after his inspiration: “Chopin” is volatile and fiery, “Mendelssohn” is just as passionate but with a hint of the ceremonial, like the composer's famous wedding march, and “Schubert” is widely melodic bordering on the undisciplined (as the composer's music is sometimes unjustly tagged by critics), the colors here erupting to bacchanalia.
Narratives in color
The horizontal works, by virtue of their linear trajectory, appears to be narratives in colors and strokes. Here again, Wilwayco seems to be pitting his trademark abstraction against the impurity of narrative, the lines and hues like a plotline that however assumes an asymmetry, the sequences all jigsawed to an indeterminate but highly dramatic mesh.
Thus, “Stravinsky” is like a jaunty celebratory dance, like the Russian composer's “Rite of Spring,” and “Brahms” is taut and deeply felt, like the composer's “German Requiem,” a feast of faith and affirmation.
Guillermo and Cid Reyes (who also writes his notes on the Singapore show) say that the new music-driven suite of works advances Wilwayco's experimentation with the psychological trigger of music, as explained by Kandinsky: “The vibrations of the air (sound) and of light (color) surely form the foundation of the physical affinity… But it is not only the foundation. There is yet another: the psychological foundation.”
But perhaps it is not so much psychology as synaesthesia: the interaction and communion of the senses despite primacy accorded to one over another depending on the art: aural in the case of music, visual in the case of painting.
If reading, words and narrative “Balkanize” the senses, an abstract triggered by music seeks to renew and reunite the senses. It is the achievement of Wilwayco's recent works that he has been able to probe the divided sensibility that owes to the dissociation of and among the senses engendered by the artifice of modernity.
If Pater is correct is saying that all art aspires to the condition of music, then there should be some credence given to Wilwayco's current music-spirited art: the coming together of the senses that should result in the communion of the spirit.
“Scherzo” by Edwin Wilwayco at 1/of Gallery, Unit C-229, 2/L, Shops at Serendra, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig; tel. 9013152; www.canvas.ph ; and Nov. 2 at Momentous Arts, 20 Lor Telok, off Boat Quay, Singapore; tel. 65353961; email mmtous@singnet.com.sg ; www.momentousarts.com