Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Cesar Legaspi once admitted: “I think that even if I were to paint a completely abstract painting, I shall always be abstracting the human figure. I can never get away from the figure.” Throughout his artistic career and stylistic evolutions, Legaspi’s abstract renderings of the human body, particularly the human torso, have evolved as he utilized expressionist distortion and cubist, fragmented techniques. Set in an engaging almostabstract field, the arms, shoulders, and spines of his subjects are prominent. In this 1978 piece, Habagat, Legaspi depicts men doing laborious work in the middle of the sea, exhibiting elegant Cubist folds. The engaging gradient hues of various tonal subtleties and intensities he utilized remind one of H.R. Ocampo’s influence in his techniques and color sensibility; it was Ocampo who introduced the concept of color symphony and the color wheel to Legaspi back in the day. Legaspi was one of the pioneer Neo-Realists who diligently pursued Cubism in their oeuvre, in the process of exploring concerns in composition and technique. Like the works of fellow National Artists Vicente Manansala and Ocampo, his contemporaries, Legaspi’s works display a highly prismatic and chromatic Cubist style, but what sets his pieces apart from them is his focus on the transformations of the human body as well as bringing out the facets of objects through planar surfaces and shapes in various hues.