This piece is accompanied by a certificate issued by Finale Art File confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: Finale Art File, Makati

ABOUT THE WORK

The painting illustrates the intriguing look between caricature, with its distorting propensity, and a cubist-expressionist response to social realist art. Ang Kiukok’s painting career can be summed up as a dichotomy of a struggle for human expressiveness and constant perfection of cubistic pictorialism. The human condition at its most pathetic or angriest predicament has always inspired this artist. Suffering and torture were images familiar to him as he witnessed these in his boyhood during the Second World War. Ang’s first trip to the United States in 1965 also proved to be a profound experience for him. He saw at close quarters the materialism of a highly industrialized society that turns human beings into machines or robots—a society that dehumanizes. Images of such cruelties continue to haunt him in the political and criminal violence reported daily by the mass media. The restricted color range of the work reflects the elegant austerity of Ang’s aesthetic sensibility. The painter’s colors not only strengthen the architectonic quality of his forms but also intensify his visual statements. It is this eruption of brutality from within civilized circumstances that enabled Ang Kiukok to extract from the scene such a convincing symbol of anguish. It’s been said that, perhaps, the rage and tempest that radiates from Ang Kiukok’s dehumanized figures serve as some form of catharsis by the artist where he pours into The Elemental Gaze of Ang Kiukok canvas the raw and festering emotions pent up inside him. Still, amidst the seemingly spontaneous fury lies a masterly technique; of control and precision; of art with a purpose. Moreover, Ang Kiukok sought to bring out the truth, the realities of society. In his own words: “I am truthful. What I see. I show.” Thus, the people on his canvas are destitute, troubled, and almost resigned to their fate. What Ang Kiukok could not express through words (he was known to have a soft-spoken personality), he expressed through his empowered and unflinching brush. Ang first achieved prominence within the Filipino art scene in the 1960s. His style distinctly fused multiple elements from modernist aesthetic disciplines such as cubism, surrealism and expressionism. Ang favored distinctly Filipino subjects; from fighting cocks, rabid dogs and local Catholic imagery. The intensity of his works stood in contrast to his own personality, described as “placid and affable”. Ang Kiukok was conferred the title of National Artist in 2001. Even after his death, Ang’s legacy continues to soldier on. Ang emerged not only as a critical favorite, but a commercially popular artist as well, which he shared the limelight with fellow national artist Fernando Amorsolo as the most widely bidded after Filipino painters in auctions.