ABOUT THE WORK

Malang’s Mother and Child is an ongoing devotion to Filipino mothers, accentuating her strength, with her elegantly long neck, a classic baro’t saya, and massive extremities. While Western cubism is all about objective analysis of physicality, Malang borrows his approach and techniques to pursue the opposite, i.e. to synthesize what has been broken down into a unified interpretation of human form. Modern painting tends to assert its flatness more explicitly, more insistently. The influence of the masters of cubism is perfectly visible, particularly that of his mentor Leger, and locally, Manansala, for whom Malang has always manifested the keenest admiration. The figuration brings to mind those satisfying early works of Leger in which circles and ellipses at sharp staccato angles vie with long, severe slab shapes, not unlike those marks made with the flat side of a soft-pointed pencil. Although influenced by Vicente Manansala’s transparent cubism, Malang’s work, as exemplified by this woman, manifest a distinct style based on the juxtaposition of shapes defined with linear quality. Using the medium of charcoal, Malang rendered the figure by employing a variety of shades, from the dark her hair to the suggestion of the diaphanous quality of her nipis blouse. Its play on textures delivers a singular quality to the work. Even without color, Mauro Malang Santos’ strong imagery remains identifiable marked by angular shapes, dotted by appearing and vanishing lines, and a geometric compositional idiom.