In The Room, The Women Come And Go…

As one visual artist with such untrammeled and consummate energy, Celeste Lecaroz explores the idea of personification in Dialogo, her seventh one-woman exhibition. Either on the blank page or through surfaces of the pristine canvas, personification imbues personal nature or human traits upon something nonhuman. It presses for the palpable representation of an abstract quality in human form.

For this one-woman show, the titles that come to the painter’s lips more than hint at that aspiration: Alaala, Dialogo, Handog, Kaarawan, Kilatis, Liham, Marikit, and Salamisim. Quite well-thought out, the abstractions that Lecaroz strives to flesh out are a people’s attitudes and values, shared familiarly across our many islands. Some of them hark back to a time now irretrievably gone. But the same project of fleshing out also teases out dispositions that continue to linger, persisting in sheer survival, still widely observed in today’s culture.

Yet why the need to resurrect these values right now?

Nostalgia serves as our swift and surface answer. This is essentially Lecaroz, painting her way through a remembrance of things past. Yet that sounds like a pat and hollow answer. For in ways more subtle and more forward, her visual array compels us to celebrate that which the heart acknowledges to be of utmost value still, making visible something which yearns to survive.

In this meticulous act of limning, beyond perfecting bodily representation of human figures, the artist strives to project a perceptible mark of inner character distinguishing each subject. From what the artist succeeds in contouring in terms of physical dimensions, heft, and motion, Lecaroz is determined to let her women radiate a sensibility, a distinct way of valuing experience.

But from which world does she draw such visible attitude among her subjects? From one’s culture, certainly – that shared context from where one may draw abiding themes, animating the painted figures of the artist’s mind, as she observes them at various times in their life.

Lecaroz is the first to muse on her project’s aspirations. She acknowledges how the pastel medium has “historical ties” with female artists, “revealed through powerful examples by Rosalba Carriera, who popularized the art of pastel painting in 18th century Venice; Elizabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun and Marie Gabrielle Capet who championed the genre in France in the late 1700’s; and Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Berthe Morisot, the celebrated heroines of Impressionism.” (Furio Rinaldi, Color Into Line: Pastels From the Renaissance to the Present).

At the heart of these paintings is the discourse of intimacy – the many hues of human closeness or affinity. The chosen moments celebrated by Lecaroz move her subjects to turn to each other, giving way to intimate interaction. Quite often, it is the gesture which their hands make suggesting the nature of that interaction.

Yet how does one such moment shape their thoughts and feelings? Lecaroz directs our eyes to consider the language spoken by the hands, as her subjects reach out to each other. With unmistakable keenness, their hands convey a keenly worded message. Yet to another extent, we can only guess at or reword the message, relying on our own intimate sense of understanding, to access what eloquent meaning those hands wish to convey.

Or could it be that their faces betray the encounter’s impact and sense of gravitas?

We see the women of Lecaroz smiling, laughing, privately yielding to pensive thoughts, giving in to that recognizable moment of sheer wonderment, a sense of quiet recognition, or the need to carefully discern a hue of feeling. Moment to moment, these women intelligently recognize what shred of thought or feeling has dawned upon them. And it is that recognition that blesses them to be enlightened – the light affirmed, also acknowledged to be welling from within.

In Lecaroz, the women could either be receiving a letter, playing a game, discerning the qualities of someone observed from a distance, or they may be stepping outside, venturing on an end-of-the-day promenade where the air is clear. We see them touched by mirth, either through the happiness that comes from outside or the joy that comes from within. The women of Lecaroz possess both, radiating linked graces of utter expression.

Lecaroz demonstrates two sure-handed ways of fleshing out the abstractions in her visual imagination. First, we see them rendered with palpable expression through the facial expression of her subjects. A second way equally allows her subjects to yield their heart’s epiphanies through discernible gestures.

Both are worlds of replete human reaction. Her subject’s reaction—the way their faces transform into that primary portal for rendering these reactions is the important success of Lecaroz in this exhibition. Here are facial reactions both keening and restrained. Yet simultaneously, through the gestures of her characters, Lecaroz scores a second effective way of fleshing out her abstract concepts. Do they come naturally? Why, yes. Undeniably, the painter has labored with precision to render in an unaffected way the gestures that ensue from such portrayed encounters.

As a spectacle of character, poses, and color, Dialogo is rhetorically a visual challenge, one intended to captivate the eyes with the revelatory surprises of composition. Yet ironically, we also end up hearing the women of Lecaroz. We chance upon them conversing in whispers. In an act of synesthesia, the paintings lead us to an audible world. The seemingly still situations provoke the subjects to experience resonant epiphanies of both heart and mind.

Somehow, Lecaroz suggests that the things that move her subjects are semi-private epiphanies. They can only be shared between them. As viewers, we look on but can only half-correctly surmise what those thoughts and feelings are. Thus, we find her women whispering low. They seem to be carrying out an act of secrecy. That makes each of her painted works an inevitable experience of the intimate.

Yet, what do the women of Lecaroz perceive? How does the abstract value descend upon their consciousness, forging the moment of understanding? What is the nature of intimate reckoning in this evocative array of paintings?

From such personified frames, we see how understanding dawns upon these subjects as something both shared and solitary. We glean the visualized idea that the women share something—a truth perceived in common. But the paintings also depict each of them to be discerning something uniquely different—asserting the ultimate, intimate solitude of consciousness.

The daylight alone guides Lecaroz as she depicts her subjects. Whatever the women do, the day unfolds for them as some recurring office that they must hold. The painter’s eye follows them quietly through the day’s changing light. Perhaps, the day is just beginning where one woman stands before her sacred icons, uttering a prayer of gratitude. Or the light could be the glow of midmorning as the women sit together to converse. Or is it a shade of the late-afternoon’s light which dazzles us when the same women convene once more to pursue a form of amusement? Or is that the dimming light before dusk which strikes our eyes when the women step out before dark, breathing a whiff of fresh air?

This way, the painter is simultaneously marking the hours, tracing gradual changes in the light, as it were. What is ineffable becomes palpably rendered, then. There are no artificial lights illuminating the subjects of Lecaroz. Quite implicitly, in the painter’s mind, the loved figures of her portraiture take their appointed places in a world before electric lamps glowed with such blinding brilliance.

The nature of light in Lecaroz gives us an idea how far in the past the portraitist aspires to reach. Here are remote senses of time quietly, carefully pursued. Lecaroz attentively discerns the quality of light bathing her subjects. She has caught clear glimpses of her women rehearsing everyday concerns. Sadly, such cares have all vanished now. Only her painter’s discerning eyes continue to behold that world, taking in what the vanishing light yields with candor. In such a spectacle, the art of portraiture, as Lecaroz rehearses it, offers no contrivances or luminous enhancements.

The embroidered clothes worn by the women of Lecaroz also transport us to a vanished place and time altogether. They affirm the distinct fashion of the old baro at saya, articles of native wear that have long outlived their daily relevance among our women. These days, we glimpse only well-heeled ladies wearing them ceremonially during patriotic occasions. But the exhibition pieces presented by Lecaroz only underscore how they come from a world now vanished. Those garbs have long been folded and placed for safekeeping in the hollow of a mothballed baul.

Still, the world as Lecaroz depicts it is immensely cool, allowing women to settle comfortably in their daily garb. Indirectly, these works lament the loss of a lifestyle. For right this moment, it becomes our shared embarrassment to deny how warmer temperatures prevail, discouraging today’s women from donning the same clothes daily. By extension, what these frames merely hint at is as seriously true. The ancestral houses where her women had lived have all fallen. And so are their jasmine gardens and groves of trees gone, their lived and loved spaces taken over by towering buildings and architectures of glass and steel, resulting in a world both red-hot and breathing fire.

This, then, is one undeniable affinity which Lecaroz’s exhibit has with Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. As in Joaquin, the loss is pronounced quite profoundly in Lecaroz: not only is Intramuros gone but every bahay na bato now stands as a crumbling remnant, its daily rituals of intimacy and insight only a flashing moment of longing and re-enacted love in the wistful eyes of the portrait artist who remembers.

About the author:

D.M. Reyes is assistant professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the Loyola School of Humanities. Promising Lights is his first book of poems. He has also written various articles on aspects of globalization, cultural studies, folklore studies, the development of fiction, a bibliographic catalogue of Filipino women writers, and monographs on the visual arts.