Butch Payawal’s transformation
By Johnathan Libarios Rondina
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:24:00 08/04/2008
MANILA, Philippines - On any given weekday, Butch Payawal casts a peculiar image among uniformed yayas and gossiping housewives waiting for their wards to spill out from the gates of an exclusive school in Greenhills.
There he waits for his 5-year-old son Odilon and whiles away the time scribbling or concocting mental recipes for dinners ahead.
“I am a yaya by day and a painter by night,” he says with a surprising hint of pride.
Those who remember Payawal’s acerbic and verging-on-the-vulgar aesthetic in the late 1990s, and his association with the Tres Acidos group (with Andres Barroquinto, Ronald Ventura) and Kiko Escora are likely to dismiss the artist’s demeanor as mere posturing.
“I was arrogant and hedonistic,” says Payawal of those days a decade ago when artists like him enjoyed rock-star status and partied all night.
Today, he has changed. The pivotal moment came about three years ago when, after a series of miscarriages, his wife Edith was diagnosed with lupus. Payawal quit his advertising job and stopped painting to take care of his wife and son.
“That was a very low point in my life,” he recalls. “I realized that it was payback time.”
His wife has recovered and, at 47, Payawal is a changed man and an artist purged.
“My reflections toward life coincide with my artistic endeavors,” he shares.
In his new series of paintings, on view in 1/of Gallery through July 18, Payawal ventures into the realm of the abstract in yet another feat of artistic shape-shifting that has characterized his creative disposition over the years.
Mature
Known for his expressionist renderings of pairs locked in the sexually charged movements of the ballroom, Payawal now shows a mature temperament that abandons the rigor of the figurative for the emotionality, depth and spontaneity of the creative process.
The seven paintings in this new collection, “Elucidate Attraction,” advance the artist’s re-conceptualization of art as a ritual of ablution, a process of cleansing the mind and body in the journey toward ascent and purification.
Payawal’s abstraction evokes images of mystical landscapes; molten lava pools or healing waterbeds hidden in caverns where hermits, mystics and weary spirits come to bathe and rid themselves of all that is excessive, human and filthy.
Water, fire, light and the reflective properties of these elements appear in Payawal’s compositions as visual metaphors for ritual purification and mental-spiritual illumination.
Thus, he divides his canvases into two planes where the lower half appear as bodies of water that reflect the luminous bursts of white and gold in the upper half. These rays squiggle upward, suggesting freedom and the ascent to a higher plane that follows cleansing.
“I have no regrets,” Payawal maintains. “Just the same, I am in a much happier place now.”
Although Payawal regards his new works as “flirtations” with abstraction, there is nothing fleeting or momentary in this seminal engagement. If anything, it is probably the first step toward a continuing love affair.
Payawal’s “My Flirtations with Abstraction” is in 1/of Gallery at Serendra, Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. Call 9013152.
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