PROPERTY FORMERLY IN THE JOE GUEVARA COLLECTION

Provenance: Provenance: Leon Gallery, The Spectacular Mid-Year Auction, June 13, 2015, Makati City, Lot 20

ABOUT THE WORK

This painting is a prime example of Oscar Zalameda’s developing interest in the elemental. As an artist, Zalameda is primarily known for his groundbreaking visual figurations of local Filipino life that combines aspects of abstraction, brutalism, and cubism. But, Zalameda’s earlier works encapsulate the artist’s experimental relationship with the medium itself. His works often revolve around pure forms of abstraction through playing with the relationship between angle, shape, and light. This particular piece entitled BarungBarong captures Zalameda in the middle of his epochal shift from pure abstraction to a much more figurative style. Although always tender in observation and mood, Zalameda’s abstract works avoid false sentimentality. His charming and airy gestural abstraction is a happy collision of hazes, even haphazard patterns of broken, contrasting monochromatic tones. The subject of the piece is a perfect fit for Zalameda’s style, given that it captures a chaotic reality but at the same time retains a familiar sense of cohesion. The gestural strokes, though too broad to be strictly speaking descriptive, provide visual equivalents of natural objects and the feel of weather effects that make an impact on the spectator just as they had been executed with immediacy.