Why cool-blue Olazo is hot these days
By Lito Zulueta
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:26:00 08/04/2008
MANILA, Philippines - At 74, the relentless Romulo Olazo appears to be getting his due. The artist of pure and gossamer geometric forms has lately enjoyed renewed critical acclaim and a new measure of commercial success locally and internationally, but perhaps more of the latter, since it is true that the local art market may be taking a second look at his achievements at present because of the buzz generated by the recent international auctions and exhibits of his works.
Perhaps a sign he’s enjoying a second spring these days is the fact that Olazo is the featured artist this year of the Director’s Choice of Ayala Museum. (Previous Director’s Choice artists were Victor Sollorano, Ramon Orlina and National Artist Arturo Luz.) Co-presented by Paseo Gallery, the show is titled “Azool,” an anagram of Olazo’s name and a fitting summing-up of the achievements of his ultra-cool, uber-abstract (and large-scale) “Diaphanous” paintings.
Olazo has always been well-represented in international auction houses, but a recent auction by Christie’s in Hong Kong yielded a hammer price for one of the artist’s “Permutation” series that was double the estimated market value.
Last year, Olazo was the subject of two exhibits in Malaysia and Indonesia, the latter held at the regional auction house Borobodur. “Indeed, one is hard-pressed to think of equivalents to Olazo’s key series in terms of bravado, articulacy, complexity, purity of intent, monumentality and sheer artistic success in . . . Southeast Asian art,” raved curator Beverly Yong.
The key series of course is “Diaphanous,” from where “Permutations” appears to have permutated. Back in 1979, Leo Benesa wrote that Romulo Olazo’s “Diaphanous” paintings constituted “an aesthetic of transparency.” The works aimed “at gauze-like effects, a dragonfly-wing type of transparency.” They were “Philippine abstract art of the international geometric variety.”
Nearly 30 years later, nothing appears to have changed from the Olazean aesthetic. The “Diaphanous” series remains the most familiar leitmotif of the artist’s abstractions.
The other leitmotif of course is “Permutations,” a hybrid from “Diaphanous”: ovoids whose gestural lines and shapes overlap one another against a jet-black background that serves to heighten their pure geometrical configuration. They are the black-and-white versions of the cool colors of “Diaphanous.”
Geometry from nature
If anything has changed in the color series, it’s in the maturity and the depth of the colors; they’re still geometry, but geometry derived from nature. The colors merely betray the quality of light in nature, and nature is basically the core of abstract art.
Nature is all over in “Diaphanous.” Depending on the viewer, a “Diaphanous” painting may look like a chrysalis, a jellyfish, a leaf’s skeleton, the butterfly sleeves of a terno, scissored fabrics laid out on a tailor’s board, leather cut into different parts on a cobbler’s or a leatherworker’s desk, the fragile exoskeleton of a fish, or even the proud paleontologist’s fossil.
Olazo told the Inquirer that one viewer saw the Mother and Child in one of the “Azool” paintings. And it is this stream of consciousness triggered by the purest lines and the coolest colors that make Olazo’s abstraction “landscape” art of the highest order—they take one to the beauty and intricacy of the human landscape.
The intimate tour betrays the movement in the paintings caused by their intrinsic light. The translucent forms and shapes constitute a color field that is kinetic and dynamic. Perhaps it is Olazean light that Hans Hoffman was talking about when he wrote, “A painting must have form and light unity. It must light up from the inside through the intrinsic qualities which color relations offer . . . When it lights from the inside, the painted surface breathes, because the interval relations which dominate the whole cause it to oscillate and to vibrate.”
It is this sense of movement that mesmerizes viewers of Olazo’s work. “Diaphanous” is a lesson in aesthetic enjoyment, which to Walter Rathenau is really the result of the congruence between nature and art.
Of course, Olazo is only glad if he learns that his works trigger a host of emotions and perception that amount to enjoyment. As always, he’s hard-pressed to explain what he wants to say to the viewer when he makes his works. Depending on the one he’s talking to, he’s either Zen-like in his equanimity or naïf in his articulation.
Interviewing him in Cubao atelier is pleasant because he’s very pleasant and unfailingly nice. But he’s somewhat at a loss for words when explaining his works.
Wife Patricia Tria Olazo is more articulate than him, and since she has seen through all of his creative demiurge, she seems more familiar about his works, indeed more knowledgeable about them.
Heroic obsession, purity
Olazo the artist meanwhile is reduced to even deeper silence, deeper contemplation. It seems for all of the monumentality and multivalent riches of his works, he’s flabbergasted by all the attention.
The attention is warranted these days because despite having a heart bypass in 2003 and now sporting a pacemaker, Olazo remains relentless in the monumentality of his “Diaphanous” series. One remembers here what Phyllis Zaballero wrote about the series’ scale—a “heroic form of obsession.”
Indeed, his bypass seems to have only provided Olazo with a new wellspring of heroism. “Azool” in fact will exhibit large works, the largest of which is 12 x 8 feet, a study in effortless translucence that betrays none of the artist’s agony and ecstasy.
When asked how much time he needed to finish such large-scale works, Olazo mentioned nonchalantly, “Siguro isang buwan” (about a month). There was no hint of arrogance or egotism.
When asked how it was to study under Diosdado Lorenzo at the University of Santo Tomas (UST), he said the old master didn’t like his class work. “Mag-abstract ka na lang,” Lorenzo supposedly told him.
But if he was stung and traumatized, Olazo didn’t show it. “Para siyang ama sa akin,” Olazo fondly said about Lorenzo. There was no bitterness in his voice.
With his good heart and simple soul, Olazo is well-liked and respected. His classmate at UST, artist James Onglepho, said Olazo’s art embodies the purity of the artist’s soul.
“Iyang si Ola (as Olazo is called by close friends) gawa lang nang gawa ng art,” Onglepho said. “Dedicated siya at kahanga-hanga” (Ola is tireless in his art. His dedication is very admirable).
In a way, Romulo Olazo has become his art—art total in its transparency, utter in its purity.
“Azool” runs at Ayala Museum’s ArtistSpace Aug. 12-25. Opening reception is on Aug. 12, 6:30 p.m.
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