Wazzup Pilipinas!
It is not a secret that art elicits something in the domain of feelings and emotions. The Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) campaigned this very sensibility in his famed essay "What is Art?" For Tolstoy, other than expression, an artist's main role is to elicit emotions to spectators. He writes, "To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colors, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit this feeling that others experience the same feeling--this is the activity of art". This particular outlook vigorously latches better onto certain artists.
Roberto M. A. Robles is one of those artists, whose style, for its whiteness and bareness, at times succeeds in saturating benign feelings. The minimalism of the artist’s works and his understated manipulation of colors allude to a greater sense and mastery of space. Robles attained a distinct lyricism that makes his studies in white almost unadorned but never void. They are quintessentially oriental: serene, delicate, pure, and suggestively Zen--a vibrant manifestation of his years of study in Japan. This truly makes him a master of communicating feelings by using not much else.
If his 2011 retrospective “Saluysoy” was about “genesis and beginnings”, the artist’s upcoming solo show at Galleria Duemila, “Postscript to Summer”, is its heartfelt afterword. A show that alludes to the nostalgia of his connection to land, his spiritual association to nature, and the humanity and memories that go along with the artist’s sensibilities. This art show, like all of the artist’s previous exhibitions, is grounded with a quest for a deeper consciousness to Filipino culture, language, socio-politics, and identity. It is, in many ways, a celebration of the realities of being a Filipino in contemporary time.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
