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ETHEREAL VISIONS: Mario Parial’s "Dreams of Joy"
By Reuben Ramas Cañete, Ph.D.
"Dreams of Joy" celebrates the new work of veteran expressionist and Filipino naïf folk painter Mario Parial. Part of the generation of Expressionists coming from the University of Santo Tomas College of Fine Arts during the late 1950s which includes National Artist Ang Kiukok, Leon Pacunayen, Antonio Austria, Angelito Antonio, and Norma Belleza, Parial shares similar concerns of translating the alienating voice of Western Modernism into a distinctly Asian avatar that dispels despair from modern life, reworks grief into joy, and recapitulates the strength of the rural countryside as the source of animated energy, with nature at its full powers of productive creation.
This is especially seen in the new set of works in which Parial loosens somewhat the grip that his famed series of women vendors has sustained in the public imagination since the 1980s, and revels instead in the allusions towards the mythological, the art historical, as well as the delightfully realized everyday of carefree innocence. The show opens Friday, 27 February, 7 p.m. at Galerie Raphael, 2nd Level, The Piazza, Serendra Mall, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. His series of nude figures cavorting among flowers and animals evokes a timeless representation of nature captured in her most fluid incarnations: the three graces; the protector of the forest; the vitality of the waters; and the constant reinvigoration of life itself through birth and sustenance.
Another set dealing with the costumed clown known as the harlequin also ties up his work with art historical references from early Modernism, particularly Picasso, while translating them with a style and genial characterization that is intensely Filipino in its celebration of life.
The reappearance of the female vendors and mothers of earlier works also come with a newer focus towards a more fluid, dynamic composition, emphasizing on curvilinear and diagonal lines that make their earthy heaviness more translucent and metaphysically alive. The still lifes also become more elevated as a separate subject matter that becomes as weighty as human subjects, almost narrating their role as nature’s progenitors through consumption, and regrowth.
Finally, the reappearance of Parial’s kites and their male players also assuages us with the constancy of a familiar face, the reliability of a veteran’s gesture towards c consistency, while at the same time elaborating on this well-worn path with the compositional dynamics of multiple section emphasis and balance.
What makes Mario Parial’s "Dreams of Joy" both exciting and worthy of the visit is its evocation towards a legendary tradition in modernist artmaking, and the crucial transformation and reworking of this practice into the idioms, folkways, and traditions that Filipinos, as well as others whose sense of joie de vivre is unmistakable, display in every part of their life. For this, Parial’s works challenge the modernist notions of alienation and anti-sociality that have often gripped Western art, and allows the community to once more dream of its ideal paradise unperturbed by the despair found only at the end of isolated introspection.
Galerie Raphael is located at Unit 2C-06, 2nd Level, The Piazza, Serendra Mall, Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City with telephone number 856-3034. You may also visit www.galeriejoaquin.com. |
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