BY: PRISTINE L. DE LEON

Olazo one-man exhibit by Paseo Gallery at the Art Fair Philippines 2019
​
Stepping back to view an abstract painting by Romulo Olazo is like pausing for a moment to take in an open landscape. Like rolling fields, Olazo's images offers vastness, in which every form, every sweep of radiant color appears inflected by light. One imagines the impressionists who would paint landscapes "en plein air" in order to catch the fleeting effect of light on color. Like their rendition of scenes, Olazo's works also hint at the idea of that painting, at its core, is an act of catching light.
​
The exhibition encompasses a wide range of techniques and mediums that inform one another. From a virtuoso piece - a large-scale painting which is representative of his acclaimed Diaphanous series - the show moves to smaller symphonies: ink-and-brush compositions, drawings of female nudes, monoprints, serigraphs and calligraphs. Olazo’s practice may have been shaped by his reverence for light and largeness, yet these works on paper draw attention to small moments and small spaces of activity. While the makings of monumental canvases requires the artist’s body to move around, there is intimacy in viewing his marks on paper. These hardly-been-shown, decidedly smaller works recall the artist sitting, drawing on tables, conceiving, seizing form, and allowing himself to be led by gestures. They become studies in formal play and free imagination.

The first major exhibition organized after his death on 18 August 2015, Olazo: Large Scale re-affirms Olazo’s place as a maker—and marker—of grand productions, re-introduces his work—now his legacy—to the contemporary audience, and reconnects the artist’s roots to the country’s foremost cultural institution. During the early planning for the exhibition, one of the proposed titles was Homecoming. After all, his first ever one-man show, The Silkscreen Process and Its Possibilities, held at the CCP Small Gallery in 1974, was highlighted by a 24-foot serigraph. In 1981, Olazo  revisited the medium, this time producing a work twice as long: a 50-foot serigraph monoprint that spanned the Museum Hallway.
 
The more undeniable link, however, was the almost similarly titled show, Large Scale Paintings. Held this time at the more cavernous Main Gallery of the CCP in 1982, it showcased thirteen black-and-white Diaphanous works. It is in the same venue in which Olazo: Large Scale returns to. By this time, Olazo had already established expansiveness as a definitiveand definingfeature of his artistic conception and execution. Prior to this monumental outing, Olazo had also unfurled two huge canvases of 84 by 96 inches for the exhibit Philippine Abstract Art in 1978, which was also at the CCP. The following year, in the show Recent Painting-Diaphanous held at Luz Gallery (which gave Olazo his first commercial gallery representation as early as 1974), he also included large-scale works—a daring attempt, considering that the paintings didn’t pay heed to the measurements of a typical domestic setting envisioned to accommodate them.

Right from the start, this native of Balayan, Batangas born on 21 July 1934, was already an artist of the grand gesture. In fact, his wife Patricia, who had painstakingly documented and systemized more than 25,000 of his works, had a separate category for Olazo’s ambitious projects: “Big Works.” Other categories, which necessarily overlapped, were “Permutation,” “Diaphanous,” “Still Life,” “Untitled-Various,” “Nudes,” “Mother and Child,” “Landscape” and “Prints.” While other painters would venture into the territory of the willfully gargantuan in order to flex muscle and mind as a respite from the comfort zone of the easel painting, it was a sustained, lifelong pursuit, a virtuoso performance for Olazo. It’s serendipitous that the last exhibition he saw completed featured a single work, the “Diaphanous B-CCXXXV,” shown at the ArtistSpace of Ayala Museum in November of 2014. Measuring at 80 x 240 inches, this work can now be examined in the airier hall of the CCP, situated within the context of his other large-format works from the different points of his artistic career.

According to Patricia, it was the working space that would be the primary challenge for Olazo in painting his large-scale works. He would paint in the driveway, on a table, or with the canvas pinned to a wall. Another issue would be the cost of materials. Naturally, the bigger the canvas, the more paint was spent, the more complicated and expensive brushes were used.

Some of the early large-scale works were uncommissioned and unsold, owing to the fact they never left the family. Stowed away in a Pasay warehouse, the works suffered from water damage, insect infestation, the wear and tear of time which, altogether, have added their own marks of ruin. Previously shown in Romulo Olazo Black and White Redux at the Art Center of SM Megamall after the Lopez Memorial Museum fumigated them, they are here again, solemn reminders that paintings are objects providing material evidence to the genesis of exhibition, adding a dimension to our fundamental understanding of Olazo’s large works, and calling attention to the importance of vigilant upkeep and conservation.

But soon, the towering lobbies and halls of government and corporate institutions required paintings--large ones--to temper, accentuate, or adorn their respective interiors. “Olazo was among the first artists to fill that need,” affirms artist and writer Cid Reyes. “The commissioned works now disported mural dimensions. Those were paintings not cowed and shadowed by architecture. Olazo’s commissioned works, for instance, installed at the lobbies of the Pacific Star Building in Makati City, are stunning in the breadth of their physicality and the sweep of their expressive power.”

Olazo’s pre-occupation with scale may also be connected to his work in advertising, which has no problem broadcasting messages using the biggest, widest medium possible. “One of his memorable projects was to execute an enlarged corporate logo on the façade of a 10-storey building,” Jonathan, the son of Olazo, writes. “The idea of enlarging a picture or an image and carrying the project out appealed to the inventive sensibilities of my father. It led him to create ingenious methods to handle successfully the visual and the execution challenges that confronted him in such projects.”

Characteristically reticent except to his family and friends, Olazo did venture his thoughts on the matter of producing large-scale works: “Why large scale? Because in the process of enlargement, the forms tend to be monumental and sculptural while retaining their gauze-like transparent qualities. Not only was I concerned with the rightness of scale, but the actual process itself demanded great physical energy as the whole body moves and the arm paints an area as large and as far as it can reach.”

Essentially, Olazo is saying two things: he wants to, first, foreground the tension between expansiveness and delicacy in a single work; and, second, underscore the hectic physicality of creating such work. When Jonathan asked his father directly, “Why paint big?” Olazo simply replied, “Gusto ko lang gawin.” (“I just wanted to do it.”) “Nakikita ko lang na dapat malaki ang Diaphanous.” (“I sense that the Diaphanous needed to be big.”) It was apparent to Olazo, both in the practical and intuitive sense, that the Diaphanous necessitated scale.

Abstraction, Olazo believed, could match up to any work, even if the work in question is the Spoliarium. To create an abstract version of the Juan Luna masterpiece was one of the projects that had consumed him in the latter period of his life. “It moved him how the field of the entire picture will encompass the viewer; how the edge would hold every peripheral angle, and how every surface area demanded to be looked at,” recalls Jonathan. While unrealized, this idea simply proved that, for Olazo, his forms in space could aspire to the condition of the canonical, in which scale undoubtedly played a part.

Olazo: Large Scale is the resounding conclusion to the opus of a singular artist who never once flinched at the face of immensity. He wasn’t stricken with “the native aversion to the large venture, the big risk, the bold extensive enterprise,” as how National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin calls our “heritage of smallness.” In painting after painting, Olazo exerted the full range of his abilities to come up with some of the most elegant, sublime, heart-stopping forms in the vocabulary of abstraction. Scale is proposed as the defining factor of this exhibition, yes, but it might as well be heroism, the kind that burnishes resolve, propels sinew and soul, and crystallizes the marvel of human creation.

Excerpts from the book Romulo Olazo

What is a diaphanous painting? It is a question asked frequently in exhibitions, interviews, or private conversations with my father. I used to think that the question should not be asked at all in the context of my father’s work, but on second thought, it might be a point worth exploring.

Does my father feel the same excitement and recall a childhood past when he is at work —finishing a layer of paint on top of another layer in creating his diaphanous forms?

​The value of hard work has always been part of my father’s nature.

My father always strives to excel, according to his own measure, and this is rather difficult to verbalize. If he has averted answering questions about the meaning of his work, it is probably a signal to look deeper into the physical workings of his paintings.

An axiom that has been embedded in my own practice is the notion that a mediocre painter would always become better by persevering in his work compared with a naturally talented but idle painter. A more important axiom is that an artist is good if he is a good man rather than a gifted but arrogant man.

At its full momentum, the diaphanous form evolves by itself with its start undetermined and its future without conclusion. Its permutations are endless.

For me, the heart of the diaphanous is the heart of my father.

My father is a good man who works hard and whose work ethics have brought him thus far. And within him is the most beautiful creative soul I have ever known.

Read the full article from the coffee book Romulo Olazo, re-printed by Art+ Magazine.

On Landscapes
Many of Olazo’s landscapes are not just expressive renditions of trees in space or in a field, but they possess a strong element of atmosphere that binds the elements together.

On the Mother and Child works
But in this subject, Olazo has worked in a wide gamut of resources, such as acrylic on paper, charcoal, oil on board, oil on canvas, oil pastel, pastel, and watercolor. The artist is keenly aware of how the medium affects the expressive content of the work.

On the Nudes
His nudes are among the most sincere and honest representations of the human body by an artist.

On Paper works
It is not to be overlooked that one of Olazo’s lasting contributions was his introduction of handmade paper in local printmaking, thus creating a healthy vogue in the use of the material culled from indigenous materials with their fascinating textures and materials, their charming deckle edges, so different from the machine-made.

On Pinwheels
But this was a game Olazo used to play with his father who constructed these colorful whirligigs to catch the now expanding, now contracting rays of the sun.

The Diaphanous Series
What distinguishes Olazo’s Diaphanous paintings from all other abstract works in the country and even elsewhere is the viewer’s immediate reception which is a mixture of awe verging on a sense of solemnity.

Permutations
What is essential here is that Olazo added the dimension of actual visual depth to the layers of transparencies that now interacted with each other not only in relative sizes and textures in terms of horizontal layers but also vertical ones as well.

Excerpts from the book Romulo Olazo

To understand the art of Romulo Olazo is to grasp the vast range of materials and techniques that he has experimented with. Rather than work towards specific masterpieces with conventional art techniques and practices, Olazo’s concern has focused on pushing the limits of different materials and processes.


The range of Olazo’s works is indeed astounding.  Aside from his impressive output in printmaking and the Diaphanous paintings, he has worked on other series in different media. During recent conversations with Olazo and while reviewing images of his early works, the artist would often state in a self-deprecating manner: “malikot ang isip ko noong araw” (My mind was restless during those days).