By Arnel Mirasol
Isagani Fuentes and I are not old friends. We only met at Facebook - he added me and I confirmed. Readily- for I saw at once that he is a kindred spirit: a fellow artist intent on pursuing his muse. But I was surprised upon learning that he was not even a fine arts student in college. He is a commerce graduate who now teaches full-time in a grade school in Marikina. It seems that Gani is one of those with inborn artistic talents, who were forced, perhaps because of economic necessity, or perhaps because their parents looked with disdain on painting as a profession, to take up a more practical and probably more lucrative course.
But the craving to create art never went away. Now, Gani talks of leaving teaching for good to paint full-time. I, acting like a concerned parent, dissuaded him, telling him that it would become difficult for him to make both ends meet if he will rely solely on the sales of his paintings. Although his wife is also a teacher, her salary I presume would be barely enough to put their two grade-schooler kids to college and maintain at the same time their current lifestyle. I suggested that the best thing for him to do would be to just take a one year leave from teaching. That way, he can devote all his time to painting, while still retaining the option, if things don`t turned out as he`d expected, to go back to a career paying a regular salary.
I am now taking a respite from writing about myself and my art, to write about Gani`s, particularly his series on pre-hispanic jars dug up (unearthed) by archaeologists (below).
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I was instantly fascinated when I saw his paintings because they are so different from mine. I usually turned out colorful artworks , so, I find Gani`s chromatic restraint remarkable and refreshing. Gani`s use of subdued color schemes reveals his mature artistic sensibility and innate flair for design. His watercolors of jars combined two extreme techniques in twentieth century painting - Andrew Wyeth`s sharp focus realism and Piet Mondrian`s hard-edged abstraction. While Gani rendered his jars with near photographic precision, he just painted his gridded backgrounds flat, with no illusion of space or perspective, whatsoever. Such penchant for flatness reminded me of the paintings of Arturo Luz (below left). Luz would have been floored by Gani`s paintings. He would have exhibited them with alacrity in his gallery, if it is still open today. With their clean lines and grids, and the zen-like aura they project, Luz, I`m sure can`t help but be fascinated, too.
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Gani was not the first to come up with this type of painting. I remember Nikulas Lebajo`s series of exhibitions at the Luz Gallery several years ago, where he showed paintings depicting bottles and jars arranged all in a row and one row on top of another (below right). But the similarity between Gani`s and Nikulas` art ends there, in their format; because the latter`s paintings, with their pared down images, leaned more towards abstraction, while Gani`s still retained traces of the sharp focus realism espoused by Wyeth.
Gani may have derived his iconography from Nikulas Lebajo, but it may have been inadvertent. But even if he did some conscious borrowing, let us not take that against Gani for he was not the first artist to have done so. Painters have been doing it for centuries. Even the ever-inventive and supposedly original Picasso admitted to being influenced by primitive African sculptures when he painted his landmark work,
Les Demoiselles d"Avignon". And Nikulas, for his part, may have gotten the idea for his jar paintings from an ad for Dos Equis Beer. The art for that ad which I saw in Playboy Magazine, bore an "uncanny" resemblance to Nikulas Lebajo`s paintings. But then, of course, the derivation may also be inadvertent.
Anyway, as a parting note, let me say that Isagani Fuentes is one artist who`s worth one`s while to watch. His paintings are palpable proofs that inherent artistic talent can`t be bottled up forever. It will find a way, slowly and surely, to blaze up and, in his case, to show to all and sundry that in art making, subtlety and restraint do have their charms.
- August 24, 2010
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