Matisse Nearly a Decade Later Continues the Conversation in a Similar Tone
Conversations with Degas, Bonnard, and Matisse
In her latest exhibition at the Galleria Duemila, Phyllis Zaballero communes with her masters
By Angela Singian
The starting point for some of Phyllis Zaballero's paintings in her series entitled "Conversations with My Masters" often begins… in a cemetery.
But it is not a site of mourning. It is in a part of Paris where the la vie bohème spirit still resides. Tourists flock there to photograph epitaphs of renowned names only previously encountered on a page. Fresh flowers and personal notes decorate the monuments. On a tombstone lies a sprig of daisies. Engraved on an elegantly simple mausoleum, the words Famille de Gas beckon to the visiting painter on a pilgrimage. Phyllis stands here before it, wreathed in an aura of seriousness and respect.
A rendezvous with Degas at the Cimetière de Montmartre
A living artist speaks to the spirit of a long-gone and legendary occupant of a familial mausoleum at the Cimetière de Montmartre of Paris in France. Her captive audience of one is Edgar Degas, whose body is entombed there with the rest of the De Gas clan.
I imagine that Phyllis speaking to Degas and wordlessly to herself. Opening the conversation on a quietly personal plane, she humbly asks permission to use chosen images and snippets of his actual artwork in a purely modern way—to process and coax them to migrate into a flexible film of acrylic emulsion. We imagine overhearing her whisper about how his art, which has inspired many generations, could continue by way of this ingenious language of technology.
But there's a rub. Zaballero wants to get into the act. She wants to conduct an artistic dialogue between the two of them, between the august Master and herself, a cheeky admirer. Could they have an intimate conversation in pigment and brush, in both serious and fanciful tones? The silence seems to answer yes. But then, coming from a place within her fondest dreams, Edgar softly whispers:
"Mais pourquoi pas, ma cherie? Vous pouvez même l'appeler 'Edgar et Moi'!"
And so, as Zaballero whimsically recounts, this is one gate through which she enters to begin her dialogue with the Masters who have inhabited her very existence, beginning with the classicals, to the post-impressionists and then the modernists. By way of her artistic musings, we too are welcomed into the conversation space. The dialogue extends from where it began, at the foot of the family tomb of Degas in Paris.
She takes us on her conversational foray through the paintings of Edgar Degas. These iconic paintings pull us into private rooms, intimately as voyeurs of his ladies busy at their toilettes in Se Baignant and Le Bain, as a female nude turns away, stretching to bathe. From these private rooms, the next frames transport us into the throbbing heart of turn-of-the century Paris.
The instantly recognizable ballerinas go through their exercises in Le Foyer de la Danse, touched with girlish charm in pink pointe shoes, though not without fierceness in an adjacent black-and-red checkered room. The perspectives further layer and tilt in L'Opera de Paris, appropriately painted in performance splendor. We meander some more to the horse races, with Les Chevaux de Course and through the flower-speckled fields of Longchamp.
At La Table with Bonnard
Then, we join her next as she interacts with the irrepressible Pierre Bonnard in Pierre et Moi, Villa Castellamare. In these domestic scenes, we are coaxed inward with freshly laid pastries and fruits. Shady, translucent leaves fall into the scene. More family feasts await in La Table and Le Bol de Lait, all the while as Bonnard's images, known for their vibrant hues and lightness, merge with surfaces painted by Zaballero's own hand. The presence of the acrylic emulsion film expands the flat canvas, inviting our synthetic intuition to lean closer, not to touch, but to peer.
'I am here with you but I am really thinking of Henri Matisse.'
"I am here with you but I am really thinking of Henri Matisse," Phyllis Zaballero says to me. The artist-at-present takes us deeper now into the realm of her favorite idol, Matisse. Sunlight filters over the delicacy of fresh oysters on their half shells in Les Huitres while the sounds of purposefully played notes almost become tangible in Le Violiniste. The process of transferring becomes meta and self-referential, especially felt when she juxtaposes other similar rooms in the striking Grand Interieur Rouge.
Throughout these shifting parameters, Zaballero enters each period with a thematic approach, closely linked with her own exposure to the Western Masters of the art world. She recounts residing near the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a child in the 1950s. Nearby was the expanse of Fenway Park. Taking a break from play with her gang, they would enter the museum's stately walls to visit the bathroom and drink at the water fountains. But before the all-encompassing landscapes in the cavernous gallery, Phyllis alone stopped to stare with wonder.
This awe for museums planted a seed that grew into lifelong foundational work for education within these institutions. Following a teenhood in Switzerland, France, and Spain, her cosmopolitan life was cut short by the sudden death of her father in Barcelona and the subsequent return to Manila with his body for burial. Hurled back into her birth country and with an Associate in Arts diploma but in severe mourning and culture shock, she looked ahead to returning to France to finally study Art at the University of Aix-en-Provence. Nevertheless, she was convinced by family to continue her tertiary education at the University of the Philippines from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. Ten years of marriage to an understanding banker soon followed, producing three excellent sons! Ten years passed before housewife and mother par excellence, Zaballero, could return in 1974 to the University of the Philippines and its College of Fine Arts as a mature freshman, finishing with a degree in painting, magna cum laude, four years later. She was back on track.
Something French, something Filipino
Today, Phyllis' conversations with these three artists come from a greater awareness. There is a sense of timeliness to these paintings, as well as a situatedness from an artist who grew up in a Western Art Historical ecology and later immersed, or more like dunked, herself into the heterogeneous world of the Filipino. The influences of the French are potent in designs of the interior, clothing, and views of open air. But there seems to permeate a subtle sense of the local—in a chair, an ornament, or even a personal pet.
Zaballero's oeuvre documents a long and winding road, traveling from textured abstractions in grid formats in the '70s to the graceful undulations cutting across Color Field backgrounds in the late '80s. All throughout her early work, she followed the strict discipline of an underlying structure of right angles, mercifully accented by gestures in myriad colors. One unwittingly found oneself looking into, or out of, the squares in what was to become her acclaimed Window Series. Her composition later loosens and expands, melting into the thrown splashes of abstract expressionism. Images in her far-ranging painting styles have reflected travels from islands in El Nido, Palawan to nostalgic trips in Spain and camping out in the "Last Frontier" of Alaska.
These latest "Conversations with My Masters" of recent pandemic years seem to be more measured and languid, although ever deeply reflective, while expressing a new analytical point of view. Albeit familiar to us because of the beloved subject matter of these three artists, they have begun to challenge the viewer with a fresh way of seeing…. and seeing yet again.
As the genial trio of Degas, Matisse, and Bonnard speak with Zaballero and among themselves in our imaginations, surely with such sparks of genius flying about, their combined brushes will move in rhythm with inspired abandon. The old and the new then become fused in a sensuous choreography of color, line, and light.
The exhibition runs until Jan. 25 at Galleria Duemila, 210 Loring St. 1300 Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines. www.galleriaduemila.com
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2022-01-07 05:00:00
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Source: https://mb.com.ph/2022/01/07/conversations-with-degas-bonnard-and-matisse/
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