Onib Olmedo

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Onib Olmedo (July 7, 1937, Manila, Philippines - September 8, 1996) was an award-winning Filipino painter.

Curriculum Vitae

Name: Luis Claudio “ONIB” OLMEDO

Date of Birth: July 7, 1937- Died September 8, 1996

Place of Birth: Manila

Sex: Male

Civil Status: Married to Bettina Rodriguez Olmedo

Children: Gisella Olmedo-Araneta Francesca Olmedo-Arias, MD

Educational Background:

BS Architecture Mapua Institute of Technology, 1959 Gov’t Board Examination for Architects, 7th place

Employment Background:

1959-1961 Architect Pablo Antonio & Associates

1961-1963 Architect Pacific Merchandising Co.

1963-1968 Private architectural practice with Manolo Evalle as business partner

1959-1986 Racing starter, Racing Judge, Racing Steward Manila Jockey Club

1969-1996 Full-time artist

Awards:

1979- Gold Medalist Art Association of the Phils Annual Competition

1980- Gold Medalist Mobil Oil Philippine Art Competition

1981- Gold Medalist Art Association of the Phils Annual Competition

1991- “Araw ng Maynila” Awardee in Art

1992- “Thirteen Artists Awardee” Cultural Center of the Philippines

Honorable Mention, Internationale Exposition des Peintures Chateau Musee de Cagnes-sur-Mer France

One-Man Shows:

1971- Solidaridad Galleries, Manila, Phils 1975- Gallery Bleue, Manila, Phils 1976- Galleria Duemila, Manila, Phils 1978- Heritage Art Center, Manila, Phils 1982- Philamlife Art Hall, Manila, Phils Little Gallery, Manila, Phils 1988- Crane Collection Galleries, Florida, USA 1989- Philppine Center, Fifth Avenue, New York, USA 1993- CAPP Art Gallery, Cebu City, Phils Finale Gallery, Manila, Phils 1994- Hiraya Gallery, Manila, Phils 1995- Philippine Embassy, Frankfurt, Germany Galleria Duemila, Manila, Phils

Group Shows:

1970- Solidaridad Galleries, Manila, Phils 1979- Represented the Philippines in the International Competition of Painters, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France 1982- Netherlands and Germany 1983- Cayman Galleries, New York, USA 1984- Two-Man Show, Gallery Frames, Manila, Phils 1988- Represented the Phils in the International Art Competition , Baghdad, Iraq 1990- Three-Man Show, Cultural Center of the Phils, 1991- Hotel Intercontinental Manila, Phils 1993- Pacific Star Hotel, Guam 1995- SM Megamall, Manila, Phils 1996- Three-Man Show, Bank Austria, Vienna, Austria

Posthumous Shows:

1998- “Ermita: Soul Portraits by Onib Olmedo” Galleria Duemila, Manila, Phils.

2002- “Quintessential Onib” Galleria Duemila, Manila, Phils

2003- “Homage to Onib Olmedo” Gallery Joaquin, Manila, Phils

“A Tribute to Onib Olmedo” Ateneo Professional School Claudio Teehankee Foundation Rockwell, Manila, Phils

2007 “Dimensions of Depth” Cultural Center of the Philippines, Mla, Phils

“My Friend, Onib Olmedo” Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Mla, Phils

“Onib’s Women” Gallery Nine, SM Megamall, Pasig City, Phils

Organizational Affiliations:

Saturday Group of Artists 1969-1993 Member 1994 Elected President

For CCP Catalogue

ONIB OLMEDO: DIMENSIONS OF DEPTH By Alice G. Guillermo

Onib Olmedo (July 7, 1937- September 8, 1996) was christened Luis Claudio Veloso Olmedo, but was more popularly known as Onib, which was the reverse of the latter part of his nickname Bambino. The artist is one of the country’s leading expressionist artists who made a name for himself for his highly original works which go beyond external appearances to explore the human spirit. Although best known for his portraits, Onib also painted a variety of subjects such as still life, landscapes, jazz musicians, ballet dancers, and horse races. The artist’s intense and abiding interest in people and the world as the subjects of his art mainly came from the fact that he inherited the job as racing steward and later judge of the San Lazaro race tracks from his father. It was in the crowded Sunday stands at the tracks that he developed genuine empathy for the large masses of people and discovered a wide range of humanity in the entire gamut of emotions displayed at the event as the hopeful and the desperate placed their bets on their favorite race horses. Onib Olmedo graduated as an architect from the Mapua Institute of Technology in 1959 and settled for a quiet family life with his wife Bettina Rodriguez and two daughters Gisella and Francesca. They lived for 27 years in a family compound on populous Washington Street in the Sampaloc district. This is one of the places which inspired Onib to paint his unique portraits because of the many interesting characters who lived in the area. Within the decade, he decided to be a painter and produced enough works to hold a one-man show in 1971. The artist’s earliest paintings were of rural subjects such as a small conventional house in a sylvan setting which he gave as gift to his wife when he was still courting her. Paintings of this early period were also rural subjects, such as a boat in a leafy alcove beside the bay. These works probably reflected his early painting models. However, these completely veered away from the influence of Fernando Amorsolo’s panoramic scenes or tableaux with the use of his famous backlighting effects. Onib’s paintings were in a more realistic vein, without idealization. Of course, it is clear that idealization never entered his art; he disdained to prettify his subjects in order to cater to the market. Rather, he nurtured an art of courage which probed his subjects without flinching. Aside from his neighborhood in Sampaloc teeming with people of the masses, Onib Olmedo sought his subjects in the streets of Manila, particularly in Malate and Ermita, adjacent bustling tourist districts that provided him with his daily subjects -- destitute women hustling from foreigners, old and blind street musicians, as well as street children learning the ways of the world at an early age. For a long while, Onib used to spend afternoons sketching and painting works in pastel at the Hiraya Gallery on U.N. Avenue, after which he would roam the adjacent Malate and Ermita districts in search of people to paint. Often, from morning to night, he would cruise in the Ermita area and sip coffee in the many bars catering to tourists when he was not painting in his car or studio. He had a gut familiarity with the city: Wednesdays and weekends he was at his job at the San Lazaro racetrack, and the rest of the week he savored urban rot in the colorful but decaying Mabini streets. Thus, there was the blond German with the puny cigarette boy at a table, their faces showing the immeasurable gap of early sorrow and old depravity. In an occasional erotica, there were the lonely night people in search of instant gratification. In exploring the streets, he developed a deep sympathy for the underprivileged, and preferred to be among the hoi polloi struggling to eke out a living rather than in classy resorts and pleasure gardens.

Distortion as Device Onib Olmedo’s painting career formally opened in 1971 with his first solo exhibit, Singkong Suka, at La Solidaridad Gallery in Mabini, with paintings such as Mother and Child (1971) and Billiard Player (1971), both now in the Central Bank Collection. Even then, one knew that the artist wanted to go beyond external reality, to consider art not as a reflection of the world but as the artist’s constructed representation of it. His early paintings already made use of distortion, including discrepancies of scale, although only at first in a moderate way. As a modernist, he wanted to make external form expressive of inner reality and he found this possible by means of distortion-- painting the lineaments of the face and figure in such a way as to evoke and summon the inner self. For him, distortion became a tool to probe the depths of the human character. Because of this, he is often considered an expressionist, and rightly so. One can likewise relate his style or approach in the visual arts to the literary theory of the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht known for theorizing the A-effect or alienation effect in art. This is a style of “bestrangement” or of rendering familiar and quotidian objects or faces strange, of deconstructing them to bring out ironies and contradictions or reconfiguring them as though seeing them in a new light. This likewise reminds us of something that Giorgio de Chirico wrote in his journals to this effect: you visualize a room in which a bespectacled man is sitting in a chair in his library and reading a newspaper. As part of the accessories of the scene, in the ceiling above him hangs a cage containing a yellow bird. A perfectly quotidian setting, one might say. But just suppose the electricity goes out, plunging the room in darkness. In the next instant, the room is suddenly illuminated by a strong lightning flash, Between the two darknesses before and after the lightning, the room acquires a preternatural tone that is cast on all objects which we know and recall with our mind but which are now not quite the same. Thus, in Onib’s work, the psychological, spiritual tone, as well as the general climate and atmosphere of the work come first and foremost, determining the form the figures will take. While Olmedo himself says that he pursues the theme of portraying the human condition rather than the human situation, thereby implying that he would rather do away with particularities of social class and even, perhaps of nationality, still much of his best work is drawn upon his immediate social environment. Such a pursuit of “essences” eventually could result in removing him from the immediate and day-to-day existential unfolding that defines a human being. Still, much in Onib’s work stems from his personal experiences. One painting in black-and-white is a savage twist of the mother-and-child theme, as it shows a woman carrying an armful of children, blighted to the bone, all spiky limbs and heads like petrified fruit.

Probing the Depths Although Onib made the scene in 1971 with his Singkong Suka Series, this retrospective at the CCP features a number of early paintings before his one-man show. His earliest work, Ugo, done in 1966, anticipated the portraits for which he would be known. A simple pen drawing of a face, it explored the use of distortion to convey character and individuality. Also part of the family collection is the 1969 Woman with Jar done in pale and subdued tones with a linear quality but without distortion as yet. His first paintings, as mentioned earlier, such as the house in the woods and the banca by the sea drew from the rural environment. In 1970, he did an oil painting in ecru monochrome of his wife Bettina which is the only portrait in which the subject has a happy smile. For a while, the proletarian sense in Onib named his shows after the cost of a few ounces of vinegar in the tingi or per measure or piece system that humble city folk are accustomed to – this includes buying but one stick of cigarette to tide one through the day. To be sure this is not a sign of a general pettiness of mind, as some have supposed, but only an indication of the capacity to pay, as in the case of tricycle drivers and fishball vendors who constitute a fairly sizable population. It likewise served as an inflation indicator as the cost continued to rise through the decade. Of his first exhibit in 1971, Mother and Child was its signature painting around which the show revolved. Now an iconic work, its appeal was in its slow curvilinear lines and cool colors of blue and green to build the image. The mother in frontal presentation has a serene, straightforward face, as well as a large body to signify strength and protective love as she cradles her infant in her arms, deliberately a trifle small, to express the nature of their relationship. His second show Kinseng Suka in 1974 at the Galerie Bleue was said to take on a more realistic vein. This is apparent in a key painting, Entrance Only, which depicts a Canuplin-like figure at the entrance of a theater. A figure often identified as the postwar comedian Canuplin, he wears a brown stage costume, consisting of seedy coat and striped pants with a small hat perched on his head. In three-fourths position with a slouch and hands in his pockets, he has the tired, leery look of the down-and-out. The third show, Beinteng Suka, in 1976 presented works in black-and-white ink wash, such as the grotesque Adele H.(1976). An iconic work, this drew inspiration from a famous film on Victor Hugo’s daughter played by French actress Isabelle Adjani who was the rage at the time but which here serves as an ironic reference. The figure in Adele H, with disheveled hair and ragged clothes, hands clasped emotionally before her face-- so stark and desperate in her destitution, is nevertheless startlingly alive, bordering on manic, breathless intensity. This work was first exhibited at Galleria Duemila where Onib held his third solo show. Other works of this period were Noon Break (1977) and Aling Tsuping (1975). He drew his other characters from the working classes: the first is a construction worker with intense, penetrating eyes in a moment of repose and the second a siopao vendor seated anxiously before her large receptacle of steaming dumplings. The fourth exhibit was held in 1978 at the old Heritage Gallery in San Juan owned by Odette Alcantara. Clairvoyant (1978), its key painting, firmly established his style marked by distortion with the aim, according to the artist, of rendering “the human condition rather than the human situation.” He was more concerned with universal essences than with particularities. Another key painting was Worker (1978) in oil on paper in square format, still part of his proletarian series, showing a triangular face, broad at the temples to emphasize the narrow, tired eyes telling of years of abuse from exacting masters and of sleepless nights of pain and anxiety, leading to a state of alienation from fellow humans. The mouth is small, diffident, and bitter, unaccustomed to speech, but on the whole maintaining her humanity and dignity. Another key painting of the period was Untitled (1979). This was still another face, elongated this time, to indicate emaciation. In darker tones, it is a nocturnal face, weary eyes of a spiritual air, high upon her face. Her lips are half-open, not so much to talk, but to catch her painful breath. It was also in the same year that he painted Dictator (1979) in oil on canvas. In square format, this veritably confirmed his skill as an expressionist portraitist, for this was a striking face of an entirely different character from his proletarian subjects. The diamond-shaped face, presented with a bold frontality, has an inescapable impact. Unlike the other portraits, the delineating lines are stronger and more decisive, the contours more definite. The eyes are placed far apart on both sides of the broad, rectangular nose. But their expression is what grips the viewer: they are not direct and commanding, as one would expect. Instead of looking straight at the viewer, they gaze through and beyond him as though following a vision. In pursuit of this vision, however flawed it may be, the eyes also bear an expression of implacable cruelty, beyond the pale of human kindness. This is how the powerful pharaonic sculptures have been described: that they looked through and beyond the world of man to a remote eternal vision. He did another face in the same reductive format, but with a different expression altogether, that of the anger and bitterness of a victim. The year 1979 saw the confirmation of his art with a Gold Medal from the Art Association of the Philippines. At the same time, he was named Philippine representative to the International Exposition des Peintres held at the Chateau Museum of Cagnes-sur-Mer in southern France. From 1982, the artist spread out his wings and sought a wider public by holding an exhibit in the Philamlife Building on U. N. Avenue in the heart of Manila. In the same year, he also exhibited at the Little Gallery and later at the Gallery Frames in 1984. The year 1982 also saw him with a group show that toured Holland and Germany in his first trip abroad. Within the decade, he stayed for a couple of years in the United States where he first exhibited at the Crane Collection Galleries in Florida and the following year in 1989 in New York at the Philippine Center. During this time, he produced a number of works, mainly large inkwash paintings in black-and-white which showed an even higher level of complexity and skill. Back in the country, he strove to make contact with the art lovers in the Visayas since he had previously exhibited only in Manila. Thus, he arranged for two shows in Bacolod, the first in 1989 under the auspices of the Art Association of Bacolod. He held another exhibit there in 1992. In between, in 1990, he had his first and only one-man show at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Also in 1992, he received the news of his being awarded Honorable Mention for two works, Concert in the Alley and The Apartment, by the Cagnes-sur-Mer jury for the art competition. Onib’s last exhibit was at the Galleria Duemila then at the SM Megamall in Pasig in 1995. It was also the venue of his posthumous exhibit entitled “Ermita: Soul Portraits” in 1997. In 1996, he was invited to Austria with two other artists, Albor and Baldemor. The suite of fourteen pastel works, the last he produced, which he exhibited there would be referred to as the Vienna collection. He died in September of the same year after a series of strokes at the age of fifty-nine years. .

Inner Spaces The expressionist feeling in Olmedo’s paintings is fused with an absorbing interest in form. Since the artist is not primarily concerned with the plane of external appearances, he composes his figures not only on the surface, laterally, but also in depth. Which is why figures interpenetrate one another, the woman with the rattan chair on which she sits, or with the capiz window grid against which she stands, thus creating the effect of a wraithlike apparition. Space, which is of the interior world, is unfamiliar and unpredictable, marked with a continuous shifting of lines and forms. Winds of feeling blow within, twisting and warping the figures writhing in a private hell. In his works in the Eighties, the artist takes us once more on an excursion into nocturnal depths, all sinking ground and howling wind, another and deeper circle of his hell. His works continue his explorations of the psyche, a painful and hazardous venture at best, which many would rather have no part of. In his paintings of people, Olmedo does not go by external appearances. He uses various means such as distortion and transparency to entrap the fierce and elusive demons of the private psyche. Imploding, he suggests, rather than exploding outwards, describes his art in which movement goes inward, stumbling through the perilous dark to an inner universe where bodies glow from within, like marine phosphorescent creatures in unfamiliar waters. When in pastel, the colors, vivid yet continually modulating, capture restless moods and vagaries.

Soul Portraits In many of his works, the human face is Onib Olmedo’s obsession out of which he has built a private Hall of Fame to counter the vainglorious personages of public acclaim. His portraits probe the point where physical appearance with its social conventions gives way to the spirit within which, slowly but inexorably, the natural lineaments of the face take over. The distortion of figurative expressionism becomes a fine-edged tool to explore how far one can expose the sensitive layers of nerve and muscle before they spring a tic or convulsive shudder. They are haunting soul-portraits of people gripped by anguish, perhaps victims of social cruelty with their tortured psyches. As such, they do not necessarily convey a palpable physical presence but are more like wraiths and orphans from a gray limbo, or ghosts of past guilt come to haunt our fitful sleep. To the solitary face, the artist provides no social background, only a neutral, dense, and softly-textured darkness. He gives out no clues or props of setting, such as those details proper to class or occupation to lend the image a specific reality. Rather, he cuts off all ties, all familiar moorings, and sets the figure loose in a vague and nebulous atmosphere. All the better therefore to concentrate on the face alone, undistracted by social embellishments or the seductions of the natural world. The face itself is often presented frontally with just a slight turn of the head, or it may engage the viewer with a fierce directness: face flush to face, a hint of neck, the insignificant slope of shoulders. And herein lies the incipient horror: we do not merely confront a human likeness presented to our view; the image itself becomes transformed into a mirror where one sees and ultimately recognizes oneself. Thus, the encounter turns into a revelation of one’s submerged identity. These figures, to be sure, are not of the same character. In this netherworld, the dispossessed and the lost drift along with their monstrous executioners, while among them also wander the innocents, the spiritual adepts, and the saints. A particularly compelling image is that of a face, its skull splitting open from the force of the Third Eye within. In a number of works, a face, everting from within, multiplies itself in a series of variations. Are they the Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes in us engaged in lively dialogue or in mortal conflict? Many are figures from lingering nightmares, their forms warping, melting, stretching, and folding upon themselves in endless transmutation. His work differs from Munch’s in that it is soundless, Onib says. Instead of a sea and sky of reverberating waves that constitute the background of Munch’s painting, here the figure, off-center, implodes in a vacuum, the bony arms clutching the head in catatonic rigidity forming a tight V that funnels the tension towards the very center of the figure. By making art an instrument to probe human nature, Onib Olmedo discovers the nether darkness that is in all human beings. One must also distinguish between the numerous faces of Everyman that Olmedo painted and the portraits of particular recognizable individuals that he did. In these, his style was consistent, but his use of distortion added a dynamic element, gaining new insight into character. Certainly, the artist also did a number of self-portraits, as well as portraits of his wife, two daughters, fellow artists and friends, although these were not numerous. Early portraits were of Bencab and Ramon Diaz; he also did two for his journalist-friend Vergel Santos, the artist Juvenal Sanso, as well as several for the owner of Galleria Duemila, Silvana Diaz. Aquino Descending the Staircase (1984), which the artist painted after the assassination of the popular senator at the tarmac of the airport, is an outstanding work of the medium (monoprint on paper). Using this medium, Onib was able to create transparency on multilevels that convey a temporal sequence by using the device of overlapping, split-second repetition In the background, an airplane taxis on the runway, unloading its passengers, while as though simultaneously, AVSECOM soldiers stalk the ramp with guns and pile the two bodies, victims of brazen assassination, that of Aquino and the fall guy Galman, into the back of a waiting van. Aquino himself is portrayed in quick repetition of lines to indicate a series of movements. His face in shock seems to be caught at his last instant of consciousness, the moment of impact, even as the bullet shatters his brain. The artist did another version of the work in pen-and-ink. Aside from oil on canvas, many of his portraits were pastel paintings on sections of felt paper. Actually, he revived a medium that was used by some Mabini artists in the postwar period for traditional subjects of nipa huts and sunsets, but Onib used its velvety textural quality as an expressive medium for his portraits. Another medium that he also used extensively was black-and-white inkwash on cartolina. He did not exclusively paint in oil and acrylic on canvas but used more accessible media to show that the artist need not be tied to expensive imported materials and that ordinary individuals wishing to paint need not be hindered by the high cost of materials. Most of the pastel paintings were dark; most of the time, they were single figures to which he at times added a streak of contrasting color to lend it vitality. In general, the figures seem to barely emerge from the darkness like haunting apparitions. Many of them, too, are nudes with huge breasts. They are libidinal figures in the dark swamp of the subconscious as Freud would have them. But sometimes, they seemed to be embroiled in complicated convolutions of struggling, anguished figures, but with an irresistible sense of rhythm in the artist’s own technique of simultaneity and the illusion of repetitive movement in a series that remotely draws from Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.

At the Racetrack This present exhibit also shows a subject not often painted by the artist, that of horse racing. Of course, Onib had a long, firsthand knowledge of horses in movement from his experience at the San Lazaro racetrack. A large painting done in 1990 shows three brown horses galloping side by side against the blue-green background with white structural markers. Compared to the later work done six years later, this painting is less dynamic because the horses are heftier and their front and hind legs tend to be in parallel position. The 1996 painting is more dynamic and implies a larger space, although it is smaller, because of the sweep of the composition indicated by the thin horizontal line of the railing of the track. Moreover, the racing horses seem to gallop with greater speed because of the lift and thrust of their legs both in front and back. The bright floating clouds in the sky add to the illusion of speed.

Still Life Paintings and Interiors One of Onib’s earliest still life paintings was Undelivered Bouquet done in 1978. Painted in his accustomed dark palette, the bunch of rosettes and the pink vases seem to glow in the shadows like a spirit struggling to be brave. Most of his still life paintings in acrylic on canvas were done from 1994 in the latter part of his career. Among them were a series entitled Musical Instruments I. II and III. Done in a much brighter and lighter palette, they showed chairs and tables, or a sofa, in a simple and uncluttered domestic setting, but most of all, they seemed to foreground a musical instrument, a flute, a violin, or a saxophone. The artist had long studied the individuality of each instrument like a living being which possessed a symbiotic relationship with its player. He meticulously brought out all their details and their particularities of form, as well as their textures in wood or metal. It was also in this period that he developed a more colorful and distinct palette built on the complementary contrasts of ochre-yellow and blue-green tones for the house interior and furniture, with lively white accents for the flowers. Later, he let the blue-green tones dominate with areas of intense orange for the tablecloth and fruit. In Red Flowers (1994), the contrast between the blue-green setting with the dark vases and the deep red flowers is particularly striking and emotionally evocative. It is in the still life paintings that one also perceives a distinguishing quality of Onib’s work as a whole: that of the sincere, unself-conscious quality of an artist who has developed painting as a kind of personal penmanship, an ecriture, in which is embedded the qualities, even eccentricities of his personality, his way of seeing which is by turns, grave and serious, angst-ridden, brave, but also unself-conscious, even enfantine in outlook. It was in his still life paintings of intense red flowers alongside a violin or clarinet on a table-- of which the artist painted a series-- that Olmedo revealed a romantic streak. For the violin is in essence a romantic instrument, and its musical literature has consisted of pieces characterized by great emotionality with their singing melodic lines, soaring passages and supplicating rhythms. In the history of painting, it has been particularly associated with Marc Chagall and his numerous paintings of lovers sailing in the sky to its music or dreaming in fields of flowers. Aside from violins, the artist also liked to paint clarinets evocative of high and pure flights of sound. One outstanding still life shows a bouquet of flowers with a clarinet. His colors were vibrant because these could communicate the pure and beautiful quality of sound. Because of their latent emotional quality, Onib’s still life paintings remained expressionistic in their own way.

The Ballet Dancers It was when his daughters were growing up and took up ballet lessons that Onib took up the subject of ballet dancers. Unlike in other works, Onib did not spare his colors when he painted them in their vivid costumes. It was also in these works that he explored the interaction of figures, as in the ballerinas of the Vienna series. A contrapuntal play of two figures emerges in the pas de deux, accented by the interactive gestures of their expressive pointed fingers. Focal points are the joints crucial to movement, especially the connection between shoulders and arms, as well as that of the head and the neck which is pivotal, and then the waist flaring into the tutu, and falling to a point from the legs down to the dainty pirouetting feet. The figures of the young girls in profile and in bright costumes are clearly delineated, the neat buns of their coiffeure and their neck veins emphasized, with no desire to prettify or idealize. Instead, they have a self-absorbed air bordering on classical hauteur. The rhythms of the dance are sometimes complemented by curvilinear arabesques designs in the ironwork of the background. It seems that he experimented with colors in painting ballet dancers. In two paintings he did in 1995, Las Bailarinas, done in mixed media on felt paper, was in vibrant red-orange and white, while Pas de Deux in pastel was in different tones of green. In these, the lines brought out the rhythms of the dance. At times, Onib painted ballet dancers in the larger setting of a party or concert. One portrays a group of dancers in white performing on a grassy field beneath a series of arcades, while three in bright costumes await their turn in the foreground. It seems that this work was done around the same time as that of an evening party in a trellised restaurant where a large number of convivial guests engage in lively exchanges at several tables. In a brighter mood is the painting with a young girl in the center with ballet dancers practicing in the background stage while some wait in the foreground. The lone girl occupying the center is a splendid figure in her white dress. Also related in tone is the painting of three women seated in a garden while another young woman works on her embroidery in the foreground. Onib’s paintings consisting of groups of figures were usually related to the dance.

The Musicians As a cool person, Onib was a great lover of jazz, the mood and melancholy of the wind instruments with the virtuoso violins. Thus, he soaked in their music in smoke-filled bars, observed them as they played, absorbed in their music and lost to their surroundings, and it was their interiority, their soul laid bare that mesmerized him. He painted jazz bands many times, conveying mood and setting. The artist captures the original religious intensity of the trombone player whose arched bony fingers siphon his very soul into the extended brass instrument, or the blind guitarist, his eyes melting into an enveloping sea of pure sound. In several paintings of jazz musicians, he uses an uneven checkerboard background (possibly a motif drawn from 17th century masters of interiors and still life paintings) this time not to convey bourgeois domestic order, but to capture the melancholy blues of the night and the mood of intoxication, not only with alcohol but with the music that fills their very being with its sound. The habitués of the club are vagrants of the district and weary night wanderers, but there is occasionally a sartorially impeccable stray guest Chairman of the Board (1990) seeking a temporary release from the corporate matrix. There are likewise paintings of individual musicians, such as the flute player and the violinist who carry their own slightly bemused air. Onib liked to paint them because their musical instruments whether it was a flute, a violin or saxophone, were like natural appendages to their bodies, so smoothly did the line of energy flow from their body and arm, to the instrument, making up an integral whole. He painted them in all media, including black-and-white inkwash in which he painted a blind musician in Wheelchair-bound Singer (1989) seemingly caught in a weird contraption of microphones and other devices, seeking in music a magical release from his condition. But he also liked to bring out the camaraderie of musicians whom he painted in congenial groups, such as Trio Los Encantadores (1989). Here the musicians are set in a checkerboard tile setting with trellis-like divisions behind them (these could have been the features of the artist’s favorite night spot) but there could not have been a better setting. The three musicians huddle together like brothers and comrades, or cling to each other, bound together by the conventions of their profession; although they may seem to be also trapped by it, they good-naturedly accept their fate to be encantadores or magicians -- weavers of enchantment. The nocturnal setting of the musicians and the night habitués is brought out in The Café (1994), a later painting. The artist conveys the loneliness, alienation, and the private heartaches nursed by bottles of beer by means of the large space dividing the two groups of figures at the left and right. Again, the space is a checkerboard design in black-and-white which, however, lacks the psychological assurance of a solid, even floor. Instead, it gives an unreal air because of its sloping quality, tones shifting from a relative light in the foreground to a gray penumbra in the farther corners where it joins the trellised background. The artist captured the spirit well: a kind of imperceptible slipping from lucidity to an uncertain madness where one must reckon with shadows and whispers. In another painting of a café, Untitled (1995), the artist makes use of color, a predominant blue with ochre and red touches. The musicians in formal attire seem to be playing for the charming lady in the foreground, but there is no communication between them for she sits at a table with her back turned, hinting at the lot of musicians who often play a marginal role at social events. The last subjects which Onib loved to paint were musicians in a jazz band. In 1996, he did a colorful painting of four musicians in a jazz band with the jaunty title of Take the A Train, the tune they were playing. His last painting before he died in 1996, this time more subdued in tone, was simply entitled Musicians. In this work, the first man on the left is playing the bass, the one in the middle is playing the saxophone, and the third on the right is playing the piano, all in the setting of a café-bar decorated with tall flowers on the tables. While each musician bears his own distinct individuality, it is the piano player who is the most interesting. At that moment, he sits, somewhat slouching, before the piano waiting for his cue and he turns to gaze at the viewer on eye level, with a direct and penetrating look, as though he were the artist himself seeking to be remembered.

Black-and-White Onib also did numerous black-and-white paintings in acrylic on canvas, as well as inkwash paintings which were done in a reverse process in which the artist first painted a solid coat of India ink on the glossy cartolina medium, then proceeded to pick up areas with a cotton swab. Using many techniques, he created many motifs in this series such as rattan weave for house sidings or the indigenous sulihiya for furniture. Many of these paintings showed destitute men and women seemingly hemmed in by fences of barbed wire or bamboo. The men are often shirtless with a wild look in their eyes; the seated women are in a perpetual condition of waiting expectantly for happiness or luck that eludes them. His paintings of mother-and-child are like no other in their striking expressions of anxiety and protectiveness. An unusual work is that of a father, carrying his frail child on his shoulders, an image of pathos. It was especially in his black-and-white paintings in acrylic on canvas that Onib revealed his fascination with dynamic rhythms. In 1990, he did a series of conveyances and various vehicles, animal-drawn or fuel-powered. At first, he began with the bullcart, a slow-moving bamboo cart pulled by a bull and hung on all sides and in front with an assortment of folk produce, mostly furniture and utensils made of bamboo or rattan weave, and with a human figure or two directing the animal. The artist also did a colored painting of the bullcart in the same vein. The artist then turned to local vehicles, Onib being fascinated by the horse-drawn carriages that were a carry-over from the Spanish period, such as the carosa, the caretela, and the calesa. The black-and-white medium suited his subjects very well as he used dramatic chiaroscuro to bring out the structure of his subjects which, in the light-and-dark, seemed to be strange mobile contraptions in which horse and vehicle seemed to be entrapped in a web of ropes, wheels, and spokes. Onib also painted contemporary forms of mass transportation such as the jeepney, the tricycle, and the motorcycle. He gave the tricycle and the jeepney a ferocious air that reflected their tough, aggressive drivers, their fenders having the look of a menacing row of sharp teeth. With his technique, the artist created multiple rhythms that suggested movement and speed. In 1992, two works of his in inkwash on cartolina won the distinction of Honorable Mention in the prestigious International Exposition de Peintres at the Chateau Musee de Cagnes-sur-Mer. These were the paintings Concert at the Alley in inkwash and The Apartment , also in inkwash. Concert at the Alley displays the complexity of his inkwash works which went beyond the single subject, albeit concentrated and intense, to a modernist kind of genre with several points of interest. A composition in two sections, in the upper section, a violinist plays on the balcony of a brick apartment, while in the lower section is a mute audience, a row of motorcycles undergoing repair by a lone figure. There is a latent discrepancy between the two sections. While playing the violin is often considered an elite and precious art, motorcycles do belong to another cultural context, implying a fast life of danger and speed. But Onib smooths out this difference because he gives the work an even tone, bringing all elements into the same context. The violinist, for instance, is not the idealized musician one may have in mind. Formless and androgynous, he only revels in his skill, a devoted practitioner of the art in a pragmatic world. The Apartment, also in inkwash, is an ironic title for a two-storey makeshift hut with a tilting roof and made of a ragged assortment of found materials. These, however, are mostly organic such as woven bamboo sidings and roofs, without the harshness of galvanized iron. A woman is on the second floor attending to her lines of laundry, while a man, possibly her husband, sings his heart out while accompanying himself with a guitar among the clutter of pots and pans. The spirit of man lives on despite the poverty of the surroundings. Such is the essence of the folk, the artist seems to say. The composition of the work is highly dense and compact, characterized by the use of numerous devices and motifs, such as woven bamboo sidings, barbed wire, etc. which contribute visual interest to the work.

The Vienna Collection In 1996, Onib produced a number of paintings to take with him to Vienna, Austria, where he held a show. These turned out to be his last paintings since he died later in the same year. The Vienna paintings represent the last stage of his career, together with his new concerns. In general, one perceives a more harmonious approach to the figure and its setting, for now the artist sought to bring out the sensitivity of his figures of men and women. The slight distortion of face, as he always eschewed symmetry, was to imply a greater delicacy or fineness of spirit that found expression in the slim face and smoothly modulating surface of skin. No longer angst-ridden, the woman subject seated by the red flowers is at peace with herself and her slightly-open mouth shows her in the midst of speech. The distortion used in the area of the eyes functions to indicate movement and responsiveness to the things around her. In these paintings, the artist developed the use of a clear blue-green in contrast with a deep red-orange with small white accents, as in the vase of flowers. The paintings of the two young men portray them as pensive with the exquisite sensibility of aesthetes—a quality which is conveyed by their delicate hands and long, fine fingers, as well as their soft, somewhat slanting eyes in their lean, narrow faces. The Vienna paintings also include musicians embracing their clarinets and violins in a close, symbiotic relationship which satisfied their emotional needs.

Conclusion From his earliest works of the Seventies, Onib showed his sympathy and fellow-feeling for the masses, the poor, the oppressed, and marginalized. His paintings recorded his wanderings in the urban jungle and the various people, colorful characters, whom he met and interacted with. He sought them in the streets and in café-bars where he shared their nocturnal music. In his heart of hearts, he cared little for fame or material reward but only thought of himself as an artist who drew from the life around him. For him, people were not in the abstract as figments of the imagination, but were real human beings of flesh-and-blood engaged in real daily struggles to survive. This humanistic perspective was his essential and lasting contribution to Philippine art. Of the modernists, it was this perspective which constituted his authenticity. In order to bring out his profound vision of human beings, he developed and adhered to a new artistic language. He used distortion to explore the spirit of each human being. This distortion was unique to Onib, for it did not have to do with the cubistic structuring of the figure by the earlier neo-realists. Rather than using formalist devices to restructure the figure, he pursued expressionism through distortion, although in the artist’s case, he did not favor bold lines and clashing colors as in many of the European expressionists, but advanced a style that was quiet, profound and intense. From his early mother-and-child works to his portraits and to his later more harmonious Vienna collection, there was always the stamp of the artist, a quiet intensity that marked the voyage from the dark netherworld to a clearer and more vibrant space.