PROPERTY FROM THE DON EUGENIO M. LOPEZ JR. COLLECTION

ABOUT THE WORK

Though the acclaimed modernist Romulo Olazo is mostly known for his translucent and gossamer-like abstract masterpieces, Olazo was also skilled in more traditional forms of art and rendering. In 1975, Romulo Olazo met Vicente Manansala that led to the artist’s watercolor and nude drawing sessions with artists Edgar Doctor, Ephraim Samson, and sometimes Lino Severino. Popularly known as the Thursday Group, they gathered at Manansala’s—or Mang Enteng as they called him—studio in Binangonan, Rizal, every Thursday for field or studio sessions despite good or bad weather. This figurative work deals with accurate physical depiction as much as capturing the essential personal qualities of the woman he portrays. His accent is focused on the search for the grace and tension in the lines of the body and the form, the emotion beneath the volume’s surfaces. Olazo’s drawing of the body is lithe and rhythmic. His carefully crafted exuberant nude in watercolor on paper translates his profound liberality which has defined the very experience of being stripped of the essential.