A Gift to a Fellow Modernist's Daughter Fernando Zobel and Paola Luz by HANNAH VALIENTE - Upon his return to Manila in 1952, Zobel fell into a group of young artists who exhibited at the Philippine Art Gallery, then the home court of the burgeoning modernism movement. Among his growing list of friends is Arturo Luz, a then-emerging abstract artist who would eventually rise to receive the highest accolade for the arts, the Order of National Artists. Zobel proved such a close bond with the artist when, in 1980, he gifted Luz’s daughter – and Zobel’s goddaughter – Paola the lot in hand Iris. Paola who was then 16 at the time of Iris’s creation was already a passionate photographer at her young age, a love that started when a Japanese artist who exhibited at the Luz Gallery gifted the teenager with a Japanese camera. Her fervent love affair with photography grew and she celebrated her 18th birthday with an exhibition of her photographs at the Luz Gallery. Zobel’s Iris perfectly encapsulates young Paola’s passion for photography. In a camera, the iris acts as the device’s “eye;” more specifically, the iris is a circular device that controls the amount of light that enters the camera, that is the exposure that makes or breaks one’s photo. In one full swoop, Zobel’s Iris not only serves as a truly thoughtful gift to his goddaughter but also serves as an analogy to Zobel’s abstractive career. Like a camera’s iris, Zobel’s abstractions push the boundaries of light and shadow, of black and white and the grays in between, an experimentation that led to two of his most popular series: the Serie Negra which began in 1959 and ended in 1963 and his Serie Blanca series, a body of work that spanned from 1975 to 1978.
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Fernando Zóbel (1924 - 1984)
Iris
signed (lower left and verso), dated 1980 (verso)
and inscribed "para Paula, con un gran / abrazo, de su padrino" (lower left)
and inscribed "para Paula, con un gran / abrazo, de su padrino" (lower left)
oil on canvas
16" x 16" (40.64 cm x 40.64 cm)
PHP 1,400,000
PROPERTY FROM THE PROFESSOR AMBETH R. OCAMPO COLLECTION
Provenance: Acquired from Arturo R. Luz, Manila
Literature: De la Torre, Alfonso and Rafael Pérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946 - 1984). Madrid: Fundación Azcona, 2022. Listed as "no 80-58" with illustration and painting description on page 612.