NOTES ON ADAM NACIANCENO'S "UNMASKED" SERIES

By Arnel Mirasol



Vivid Memory of One Night Bliss

This painting exemplifies best the theme that Adam Nacianceno tackles in his Unmasked series. Unmasking involves the exposure or revelation of the true hidden self. It is the peeling of layers that opaques a hidden truth. This painting, which tells of Nacianceno's recollection of a smile, is his way of prodding us to jog our memory and recall for ourselves the selfsame experience of being smiled at. Nacianceno claims that the bliss he speaks of here is not of the physical or sensual kind which dissipates easily. He portrays here the mental or intellectual kind of bliss that fixes itself in one's mind and stays there forever. This painting is a revolving composite of faces. We see eyes that seem to be randomly placed, but are in fact components of faces masked by repeating floral patterns. The fusion here of Jackson Pollock's drip and splatter technique and a Jugendstil artist 's obsession with intricate floral drawings is what distinguishes Adam Nacianceno's art from those done by abstract painters before him. Not to mention his obsessive predilection for black and white, which make him a rare bird indeed in a Philippine art scene aswarm with colorful artistic personas laden with their colorful paintings.

Cultivating My Own Flaws

Flaws are part and parcel of everything. Nature has them. and so do human beings. Artists, by being more sensitive and attuned to outward appearances, are very much preoccupied with finding flaws. But they do not seek flaws to denigrate: they seek them to correct and perhaps make those who have them more visually appealing. Flaws shouldn't be look at as something permanent. They should be starting points on our path to bettering ourselves. Artists in particular should consider flaws not as prison walls that confine, but as hurdles to jump over and leave behind. That is the essence of life - the struggle to attain perfection or something resembling it. Again, the swirling drips of paint can be seen as something other than what they are - they could be looked upon now as the flaws marring the faces. But then, it is these twirls and swirls of white and black paints that lend these painting its abstract expressionistic charm. Without them, the bravura and dynamism that are this painting's principal strength would be lost. We now come to the question of Adam Nacianceno's choice of palette. Why does he persist in his achromatic ways you may ask. Nacianceno said that white and black represent for him the two principal landmarks in a man's like - which is birth and death. In between these two, according to him, are the various shades of gray, which a creative and resourceful man could turn into a full spectrum of colors that would represent a life lived to its fullest potential. 

Hunting My Faceless Reflection

Moments of doubt recur with disturbing frequency among artists, especially so among serious painters who don't look at their art making as mere money-making ventures. Being practical is not always a serious painter's strongest suit. Although the impulse to create never ceases, there are times when artists pause to ponder whether the things they are doing are worth their while. It is during those moments that artists conduct a thorough search for their own true selves. They are faceless at this point. They are not yet unmasked. The urge to veer off in another more practical direction surges strongly here. The artists dissect their faces with minute precision to seek there the marks that would indicate whether they are truly built to suffer and afterwards triumph for their art. The spirit of a true artist triumphs sometimes. But many fall along the way and leave serious art making to spend their energies in more lucrative enterprises. The face that can be discerned in the painting is the finished artwork, the creation. The paint drips and splatters, and the intricate patterning are the veils that mask the artist's face and render it faceless. Nacianceno's art is painting at its most serious. He had cast the die, in a manner of speaking, minutely analyzed his face that was previously masked by doubts, and saw it as the visage of a true artists willing to suffer, and perhaps triumph thereafter, for his art.



Illusion of an Unfolded Dream

Illusion of an Unfolded Dream

When we speak of dreams, we speak of illusions. We speak of hopes that have not come into fruition yet. There are pleasant dreams, and there are nightmares. It is the pleasant dreams, which are unfolded serenely during sleep, that we want to prolong. Here, Nacianceno speaks of abrupt awakening, of the sudden cessation of a pleasant dream, resulting in feelings of frustration and the strong desire to resume sleep to recapture that lost dream. That frustration is reflected in the raised eyebrow and glaring eye of the face in the painting. The drips and splashes of swirling paints, the smudges, and the blurring floral patterns hint of the turmoil a person deprived of his sweet dream is undergoing. The floral images here are all graphic patterns. They are not representations of natural flowers, and are all distinct or non-repeating. Doing that is not easy. But Nacianceno did that, facilely, proclaiming to all his heightened sense of design and rampant creativity. The very title of this painting, and all of his paintings for that matter, suggests Nacianceno's poetic leanings. His paintings are visual poems saying something without explicitly saying them.