Cid Reyes’ homage to masters
Anchored on the idea of channeling a public image into one’s own, art critic, and visual artist Cid Reyes remakes masterpieces by famed Filipino and foreign artists, rendering these in his own flair and style.
These include, among others, works by National Artists Benedicto “BenCab” Cabrera, Carlos “Botong” Francisco, Ang Kiukok, and Vicente Manansala, award-winning painter and cartoonist Mauro “Malang” Santos, and French critic-painter Jean Metzinger.
Ten of these pieces, rendered geometrically, are on exhibit at Galerie Joaquin at The Podium in Mandaluyong until Feb. 28 in a solo show titled “Homage to the Masters.”
When asked why he was drawn to this style, Reyes said it is because geometry is “elegantly neat, clean, and exact, rejecting inessential ornamentation.”
He added, “I am an artist working in both gestural and geometric painting idioms, with the challenge of converting and reducing a figurative image to its geometric essence.”
Personal links
These works are extra special to him as he has personal links to the Filipino masters through countless interviews he conducted. On foreign masters, these artists have “pervasively dominated my consciousness since my student days.”
“All these artists, in one way or another, have shaped my taste, sensibility, approach, and attitude towards art,” he said.
Creating works in homage to masters or mentors is a venerable tradition in art and artmaking. Reyes said that “homage painting is when the artist adopts the content or features of another artist as a mark of respect or admiration and reinterprets the image in his own style.”
He gives examples such as Pablo Picasso who did many versions of Diego Velasquez’s “Las Meninas” painting as well as Eugène Delacroix’s odalisques (chambermaids), and Vicente Manansala who executed versions of Dutch masters.
Arturo Luz, he said, was also prolific in his homage works to Swiss-born German Paul Klee, the Italian Marino Marini, the Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi, and Spanish modern painters like Fernando Zobel, Manolo Millares, Rafael Canogar, and Luis Feito.
Zobel “did a series of paintings called ‘Dialogos’ where he ‘conversed’ with European masters by abstracting their works.”
Detached objectivity
In his homages, Reyes injects his own brand of art by not only depicting the pieces geometrically but executing these in vibrant tones, easily beguiling the viewer.
The sinuous “Sabel” by BenCab is playfully executed with Takashi Murakami’s signature “smiling flowers” positioned to conform the subject’s movement.
Manansala’s iconic work, “Pamilya,” is given a rather poignant but lighthearted scene of bounties received.
Meanwhile, Reyes’ choice of colors in his rendition of Malang’s “Carroza” aptly demonstrate the religious scene, holy but at the same time, celebratory.
These works do not diminish the meaning and essence of the original paintings but enhance them, giving them another perspective to appreciate.
As a critic, these paintings allow him “to view the end product with a detached objectivity, viewing them as works with a life outside their creator.”
Furthermore, these homages according to him, convey the rich inexhaustibility of images, which other Filipino artists can mine as an iconographic granary.”
Since 1969, Reyes has mounted more than 10 solo exhibitions and written many books on art including “Malang: Paintings and Drawings” in 1981 and “Herencia: The BPI Art Collection” in 2005.
He is a multi-awarded art critic, receiving the Art Criticism Award in 1979 from the Art Association of the Philippines, and the Art Critic of the Year Award from Art Quarterly Manila in 2001 to 2003. In 2007, the Creative Guild bestowed on him the Lifetime Achievement Award in Creativity.
Author’s note: Reyes’ artist interviews are available on the ArticulatePH channel on YouTube.
