Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

There has long been a consensus that Augusto “Gus” Albor is one oft he foremost abstract Filipino painters working today. His mastery of the visual language was recently in full display in the retrospective, Territory, which chronicled his works from 1969 to 2018 (almost half-a-century) at the Ayala Museum. Albor’s aesthetic has a gritty, in-your-face quality, which makes his abstract works a kind of imprint of the energy of the life of the city. For instance, this work, Temperature – J2 II, recalls the gray of pavements and the urban jungle, whose surface reveals a variety of mark. The two sides of the work bisected by a thin red line (an allusion to that of the thermometer), though both gray, are fundamentally different worlds. Does the line then, instead of breaking them apart, actually sew these two fields together? It is the crucial element, similar to the iconic line of Barnett Newman, which indicates, affirms, and extols the human gesture.