Roy Veneracion
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Roy Veneracion | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 31, 1947 |
| Education | University of Philippines |
| Spouse | Susan del Mar Lopez (married 1970-present) |
| Children | 3 |
| Awards | Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artists Awards for the Visual Arts |
Roy Santos Veneracion (Tagalog pronunciation: [bɛˈneɾaʃon]; born July 31, 1947) is a Filipino painter whose work explores a wide range of styles, techniques, materials, and subject matter. He is considered one of the leading abstract artists in the Philippines and the precursor of contemporary Aesthetic Syncretism. His work is associated with the Syncretism Art Movement in the Philippines and abroad.
Early years
Veneracion grew up in Manila, Philippines, which recently gained independence from the United States on July 4, 1946. This event and the cultural change which followed became early inspirations for his work. He attended elementary school at the Espiritu Santo Parochial School in Sta. Cruz Manila, a Catholic school run by Belgian nuns, where Verneracion earned early recognition for his artistic skills, and was recognized as an art prodigy. He has stated that he has no memory of drawing in the manner of children of his age. As a student, he was frequently tasked to decorate the blackboard on special occasions, create biological and anatomical illustrations for his science classes, and drew maps for geography subjects.
His early influence and early mentor was his maternal uncle, Bienvenido Santos, who recognized his talent and informally coached him and his older brother with tips on anatomy, proportion, chiaroscuro, linear perspective, and animal drawing. Santos was a former student of Fernando Amorsolo and neo-Classicist Guillermo Tolentino, but he did not continue his artistic pursuits due to serving in World War II as an army officer. Verneracion was later gifted an art book on figure drawing, an oil paintbox, and a boxed set of pastel colors, by his uncle as his artistic abilities grew.
As a second-year high school student at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran, in Intramuros, Verneracion was awarded the first prize in a student's art contest for a satirical ink drawing he did on the subject of a professor and student's classroom interactions. In his third year, Verneracion was commissioned by his older brother's class to make a series of full-body watercolor illustrations of all the characters in Jose Rizal's great novels: the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. He received 35 pesos for each drawing, and the works were displayed along the corridors of the U.E. Classrooms where he attended his senior years in high school.
Family
Verneracion's father, Geronimo Veneracion II, was a lawyer, a summa cum laude graduate who topped the National Bar Exams and received a Doctorate of Laws Degree from the Universidad Central de Madrid during the reign of Generalisimo Francisco Franco. His mother, Aida Santos, was the daughter of Mayor Dominador Santos of the town of Bocaue in Bulacan, and Pacita Flaviano Santos. His paternal grandparents were school masters: Geronimo Veneracion was the head teacher, and Antonia Ongtengco, the local school's principal. They owned and managed farmlands in San Rafael, Bulacan, acquired from their savings as schoolteachers, and subsequently were rice traders. Roy was the second eldest son in a brood of four children. His siblings are Geronimo III, Leticia, and Reynaldo. He married Susan del Mar Lopez, a schoolmate from art school, and they have three children: Rachel, Ian, and Mikhail.
Education and adult life
Roy pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in the University of Philippines College of Fine Arts. Verneracion majored in advertising instead of painting due to his parents' concerns about the financial security of a career in arts.He was quickly popular with his fine arts professors because of his well-honed skills in all the classical media, which included painting still life in oil or watercolor and drawing from the classical sculpture replicas, and performed well academically. He was awarded the First Prize for his illustrations for his Editorial Design thesis.
In 1970, Veneracion married Susan Lopez, a fashion model and Binibining Pilipinas finalist, and they soon had their first child, Rachel. He found jobs in advertising agencies and worked in the creative department of PhilProm. In 1972, after the declaration of martial law by President Ferdinand Marcos, all news media outlets were closed. Veneracion was not fired, but chose to resign his post to pursue a career as an artist. His work was soon displayed in group exhibitions in the Galerie Bleue in Makati. In 1974, at the encouragement of some former classmates, Verneracion joined an art contest sponsored by the newly founded Miladay Art Gallery in Makati. He did not win the competition, but was offered a personal exhibition of his work in the gallery the same year. These exhibitions, and others in rapid succession quickly led to his rising prominence as an abstract expressionist.
Under martial laws, foreign travel was banned from 1976 to 1979 but Veneracion, along with some former classmates, acquired travel permits to Europe, Canada and the USA for his exhibition at the Philippine House in Mainz, Germany. During the trip, they visited the Tate, the Lourve, Montmartre, and the Pegal districts, which is said to have increased his artistic exposure and insights. They also visited other Filipino artists living and working in Paris, such as Nena Saguil, put on multiple exhibitions while in the US. In 1980 and 1981, Veneracion was made Artist-In-Residence of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and was a frequent artist at the CCP Annual Exhibitions organized by museum director Raymundo Albano. During this period, Verneracion developed the style of merging differentiated art principles with abstractions, and his work criticized the upcoming dictatorial regime and the arms race between the USSR and the NATO Allies.
In 1986, The Marcos Dictatorship was dismantled by the People Power Revolution. Veneracion made a painting depicting the events on canvas with symbolic imagery, and participated in the revolution with his wife, their children: Rachel and Ian, and Carating.
In 1990, Veneracion received the Cultural Center of the Philippines's 13 Artists Award.
Veneracion launched a show titled SYNCRETISM & BEYOND in 2005 at the Mag:net+ Gallery in Makati, a gallery which specialized in avant-garde. The exhibition was received well by critics, such as Dr. Reuben Ramas Cañete of the University of Philippines, and was later acquired by the Philippine National Museum. Verneracion's collection, IKA-13 PANGITAIN NI JUAN, an exhibition criticizing dictatorship, was put on permanent display.
Philosophy and style
His painting style consisted of pouring liquified oil paint onto puddles of water on prepared board panels laid flat on the floor, which he tilted to make the mixture flow in various directions creating rainbows of colors that coalesce into unpredictable Surreal configurations. The medium and the technique suggested the approach to take with subsequent improvisational gestures that sometimes included: soil, pebbles, nails, twigs, and print markings of the artist's body.
The cobbling and suturing together of different or opposing elements, both old and new, conventional and radical, and positive and negative, into a resulting artwork that advocates an expanding and expansive goal, has a fourfold aim, according to “The Syncretism Manifesto” also written by Roy. These aims include: “the rejection of dogmatism, fundamentalism, traditionalism, and exclusivity: the denunciation, repudiation, refusal, elimination, and discarding of charlatans posing as artists and art lovers who twist public opinion into believing that marketability equals artistic excellence; debunking the singular, signature style as a means of mass production and easy product recall; and the cultivation of multiple styles, multiple techniques, multi-media, multiple personalities, and guises, in order not to be pigeon-holed and trapped in little boxes to be rarefied, classified, or commodified. For this to be achieved, the movement subscribes to the “embrace of all denominations, factions, cliques, trans-genders and breeders, the establishment, the heretics, the marginalized, the ostracized, the fat, the thin, Capitalists and Communists:” and “the assimilation of Americanism, Europeanism, Chinafication, Japanization, Latinification, Filipinization, Art Brut, Naif, Dada, Fluxus, Subliminal-Automatism-Abstract, Pop, Anti-Art, Baroque, and grandma Art.”
This combination of the catholicity of taste as well as a pan-inclusivity of viewpoints and perspectives - except those which reject outright the Syncretist values of intellectual openness and freedom, as well as the very explicit prohibition against artistic falsehood and the surrender to the commodity market, originates from very distinct historical roots: the liberal atmosphere of the late Sixties era U.P. Diliman, with its contradictions of bureaucratic orthodoxy intermingled with faculty and student radicalism and the cornucopia of disparate aesthetic thoughts percolating within the Fine Arts studios. This included Bobby Chabet's anti-commercialist Conceptualism; Jose Joya's embrace of both Abstract painting and Figurative Drawing; Virginia Flor-Agbayani's romantic Modernism; Rod Paras-Perez's formalism and the great Western tradition; and Billy Abueva's native figuration circumscribed either in modernist brutalism or a curvaceous sensuality. Of these mentors, Joya was the closest to Roy's felt advocacies and crystallized for him the fluid possibilities of fusing and rejoining what the Western mind has sundered apart in the name of hegemonic imperialism and homogenous modernity. This was expanded by Roy's journeys in Japan, Europe, and the U.S. to witness the works firsthand of the major innovators of the period from the Seventies to the Eighties: Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Eric Fischl, and David Salle. This outward journey also expanded his horizons by not simply limiting the visual experience to the great museums (the Louvre, the Tate, MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim, Fukuoka) but also to the peripherialized areas of modern (read ethnic) artistic production, such as studios of American-Indians, Asian-Americans, Canadians and graffiti artists in Los Angeles and New York. Reflecting on his work and applying it to his own historical and cultural context in the Philippines since the mid-Eighties, Roy laid the foundations of his Syncretism principle through this globalized synthesis and cobbling together of various artistic principles, introducing as his suturing strategy the local context of lived experience, historical trauma, and contemporary portents of future catastrophe. Flash forward to 2010. With the success of his 2008 Syncretism exhibition at LA Art Core in Los Angeles behind him, Roy once more revisits the territory of opposing ideas that have led him down a twenty-year path of differential art making, this time into twin forms of multi-paneled paintings which he calls "Cluster paintings"; and scroll-type "tapestry paintings", both of which subvert the traditional dichotomies of western and eastern painting approaches in distinct ways. The cluster paintings expand the visual scope beyond the strict boundaries of a single frame, allowing multiple paintings to cohere visually by "accretion", or the assemblage of differently-sized quadrilateral canvases beyond a central core, exploding the monolithic nature of "square framing". The tapestry paintings do away with the restrictive box frame itself, floating over the wall with its Asian-style scroll hanger and becoming one with wind and earth elements. Thus, both formats transgress accepted boundaries or restrictions to art: the first being rooted in the tradition of singular masterpieces; the second as a silent commentary on the domination of one culture over another.
Their inscribed aesthetic patterns (their 'painted-ness and its "content", so to speak) are a by-now distinct blend of abstract washes and gestural strokes and figurative re-renderings in paint of stock images from photography and pop culture. On the one hand, they coexist on the picture plane formally, either as "ground-figure relationships" (such as can be found in "Three Graces" and "Independence Day-So What Have We Done") or as key blocked elements that subdivide the composition into zones of abstract-figure contrasts (as can be found in "What About Our Children" or "Antique Store Cards Create Nostalgia"). At another level, they also play at the subtle social and cultural differences between depicted subjects within a general figure-ground composition. "Maria Clara and the Natives", "The Musicians" or "Perseus and the Igorots" explore this more nuanced narration of social and cultural disjuncture, where the oppressive impact of Western colonization and imperialism in the Philippine experience is both felt and resisted both by the colonized as well as the colonial, resulting into parodies of conflicting images immersed in acid baths of Modernist color-fields. At still another level, the evocation of lost nature and imperiling globality makes itself felt in works like "Holy Macaque" or "Heir to the Ages", with its air of environmental catastrophe looming over the horizon, a disaster traceable to the unsustainable industrial consumerism that global capitalism has unleashed upon late modern life and material relations.
The last motif, which Roy also focused on in his 2008 "Syncretism" series, is also joined by "abstract works" (abstract in the sense that they utilize Non-Objectivist visualities in painting) that combine both fluid color-washes (of the style associated with Louis Morris) with thick, nervously-drawn gestural strokes with thick textures (like Sam Frances as loosened up by graffiti art) but combined in a visual montage of bright colors and sensual forms verging on an erotic descriptive intermingled with the materiality of daily life. This is then re-read into the artist's vision of nature and human experience, becoming palimpsests wherein we (as him) occupy surrealist-like dreams of wonder and regret ("Catching Clouds in Polychrome", "Seen and Unseen", and "Dawn Dispersed the Night"), narrate ironic metacommentaries of elitist consumerism ("Corporate Chic" or "Subliminal Abstract"), or a poetic return from civilizational (because patriarchal) hypocrisy towards a non-judgmental Nature that is motherly and nurturing ("Fragile Blue Sky"). The key to understanding these double-coded works is Roy's invocation of "pareidolia", or the human psyche's ability to recognize patterns from otherwise random forms. Also, the Latin 'alucinari' is flagged, as in the hallucinatory effect of dreams, mirages, and coded symbols that may mean nothing and everything simultaneously.
The role of the artist as conceptualizer of ideas coupled with the revolutionary nature of the avant-garde practitioner who sees the virtues of both the ideal and the unified thus indentures the forms that Roy Veneracion deploys in the reiteration of aesthetic integration - a melange of sorts - produced through this polyvalence of approaches and perspectives. Analyzing his position in the painting titled The Painter, Roy summarizes Syncretism as an omnivore's passion for the textural integrity of disparate elements in (philosophical) diets and (kinesthetic) desires, one that simultaneously expands away from the limitations of rote traditionalism to encompass a world of gestures and ideas, summoning in their unitary resuturing another world that is ideal, whole, and free.
Exhibitions
One Man Shows
2016 FINDING WITHOUT SEEKING, Altromondo Arte Contemporaneo, Greenbelt 5, Makati
2013 ROY VENERACION - SYNCRE ART. NCCA GALLERY, NCCA Bldg., General Luna Street, Intramuros, Manila.
2011 THE ESSENTIALITY OF POLYSTYLE SYNCRETISM TO A MULTIPLE PERSONALITY ARTIST IN THE 21ST CENTURY - NOVA GALLERY warehouse 12A La Fuerza Compound, Don Chino Roces Ave. Makati
2009 SYNCRETISM - ROY VENERACION; Jack Miller & Associates Gallery, La Cienega Blvd., L.A. Ca., USA
2008 SYNCRETISM - ROY VENERACION; Union Center for the Arts., L. A. Artcore, Judge John Aiso Blvd., L.A. Ca., USA
2005 SYNCRETISM & BEYOND; Mag:net+Gallery, Paseo de Roxas, Makati
2004 CHAKRAS - The Region of Power; West Gallery, Glorietta, Makati
2002 Galleria Duemila, Artwalk, S.M. Megamall, Mandaluyong
2002 Mag:net+The Loop, ELJ Center Bldg., ABS-CBN Compound, Quezon City
2000 SUPERIMPOSE West Gallery, Glorietta, Makati
1995 Solar Drive, Hollywood Hills, L.A. Ca. USA
1994 TO YOUR UNCONSCIOUS; Galleria Duemila, Artwalk, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong
1991 RANDOM EXPLORATIONS; Brix Gallery, Makati
1991 PAINTED OBJECTS; Alliance Francaise, Makati
1989 MURAL PROJECT; "Ito na nga ang Paraiso ni Juan Tranquilino" Bulwagang Carlos V. Francisco, CCP, Manila
1987 LUZVIMINDA, Finale Art File, Makati, MM
1986 SKITZO; Penguin Cafe and Gallery, Malate, Manila
1983 CCP Small Gallery, CCP, Manila
1982 FIFTH ONE-MAN-SHOW, Gallerie Bleue, Rustan's, Makti, MM
1981 Hiraya Gallery, U.N. Avenue, Ermita, Manila
1975 Philippine Art Center, Quad, Makati, Rizal
1974 1st ONE-MAN-SHOW; Miladay Art Center, Quad, Makati
Group exhibitions
2016 ABSTRACT ART, FINALE ART FILE, Pasong Tamo, Makati
2014 SAMPO’T ISANG DALIRI Galeria Astra, Makati
2012 MANILART, XMX Center, Pasay
2009 KWATRO KANTOS, Sining Kamalig, Gateway, Cubao, Quezon City
2008 JACK MILLER & ASSOCIATES GALLERY La Cienega Blvd, L.A. Ca. USA
2007 PEERS ENSEMBLE, Pinto Gallery, Antipolo City
2006 3 MAN-SHOW - Roy, Ian & Mikhail, Mag:net+Gallery, The Loop, ELJ Center, ABS-CBN, Quezon City
2004 FORUM FOR FOUR, Art Forum, Caimhill Road., Singapore City
2002 17th ASIAN INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, Daejeon Municipal Museum, Daejeon, Korea
2001 HECK FINAL, City Gallery, Los Feliz Blvd. Ca. USA
2000 TRANSMODERN TRANSGRESSIONS 3 Artists Show - Roy, Ian, and Chati, Bulwagang Fernando Amorsolo, CCP, Manila
1999 THE 14th ASIAN INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan
1999 LABINTATLO, CCP Main Gallery, CCP, Manila
1998 EROS, Crucible Gallery, Artwalk, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong
1997 MODERN ART, Art Center, Megamall, Mandaluyong
1996 UNBOUNDED, Australian Center, Makati
1992 ASIAN INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, Indonesia
1991 DANGEROUS BUT ORDAINED, University of the Philippine, Quezon City
1990 CCP GAWAD PARA SA SINING BISWAL, 13 ARTISTS AWARDS, CCP Main Gallery, CCP, Manila
1989 SEGUNDA BIENAL DELA HAVANA, Wifredo Lam Center, Havana, Cuba
1988 2nd ASIA-PACIFIC ARTS FESTIVAL, Club Med, Cherating, Malaysia
1986 BAGKUS-BUGKUS (BECAUSE WE'RE TOGETHER), Metropolitan Museum of Manila
1986 PIGLAS (BREAK FREE), CCP Main Gallery, CCP, Manila
1985 2nd ASIAN ART FESTIVAL, Fukuoka Museum, Fukuoka, Japan
1984 A ROADSHOW EXHIBITION, People's Republic of China
1983 SITEWORKS II, U.P. Los Banos, Laguna
1981 ASEAN TRAVELING EXHIBITION, ASEAN Nations
1980-1988 CCP ANNUAL EXHIBITIONS FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, CCP, Manila
1980 SEVEN FILIPINO ARTISTS, Philippine House, San Francisco, USA
1979 MUSEUM ARTISTS, 1979, MOPA, Manila
1978 SEPIA WORKSHOP, Soho, New York City, USA
1978 INSIGHTS INTO PHILIPPINE CONTEMPORARY ART, IMF Building, Washington D.C., USA
1977 CANADIAN NATIONAL EXPOSITION, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
1977 Amerasian Center, Washington, D.C. USA
1976 Mullen Hall, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. USA
1976 FOUR FILIPINO ARTISTS, Oxon County Library, Alexandria, Virginia, USA
1976 FIVE FILIPINO ARTISTS, Philippine House Mainz, Germany
1976 KONTIKI, Kowloon, Hong Kong
1973 MINI-MAXI EXHIBITION, Gallerie Bleue, Rustan's, Makati
AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS:
1990 Cultural Center of the Philippines Gawad CCP Para sa Sining Biswal or 13 Artists Awards
1982 Art Association of the Philippines Recognition of Excellence in the Arts Award
1968 1st Prize Award- College Thesis, Editorial Design, U.P. College of Fine Arts
1960 1st Prize- Student's Art Contest, San Juan de Letran College, Intramuros, Manila
RESIDENCIES:
1983-1984 Cultural center of the Philippines Artist in Residence - Conducted Creative Workshops for the Arts
GRANTS:
1989 CCP Mural Project 6, Bulwagang Carlos V. Francisco
1990 CCP 13 Artists Awards Exhibition
References
Sources
1. ART AND ITS CONTEXT, essays, reviews, and interviews on Philippine Art-Reuben Ramas Canete, University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, c. 2012.
2. THE NATIONAL MUSEUM VISUAL ARTS COLLECTION published by National Museum of the Philippines Executive House, Padre, Manila, c. 1991.
3. ART PHILIPPINES, The Crucible Workshop, c. 1992.>
4. National Commission for Culture and Arts Gallery presents: Roy Veneracion-SYNCRE ART 2013, www.ncca.gov.ph
5. UNEXPLORED TERRAIN, Hannah Jo Uy and Pinggot Zulueta, MANILA BULLETIN, May 2, 2016.
6. FINDING WITHOUT SEEKING, Reuben Ramas Canete Phd, THE PHILIPPINE STAR, May 2, 2016.
7. ROY VENERACION OPENS UP TO THE WORLD, Cid Reyes, PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER, May 23, 2016
8. interview with the artist