Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Buen Calubayan, an Ateneo Art Award Grand Prize winner 2013 (Fressie Capulong; Blanc Peninsula 2012) and 13 Artists Awardee (2006) creates paintings that carry the charge of the 'sublime', a vehicle of overwhelming feeling of awe and wonder towards nature. ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, a work exhibited at the Liongoren Gallery in his two-part 'Bionotes' exhibit that started with 'Biography' in Blanc and culminated in the Ateneo Art Gallery exhibition 'Biowork', captures this sense of awe and wonder. Named after the seminal novel by Dostoyevsky, a story of patricide and a key text in the canon of existentialist thought, Calubayan chose to interpret his state of mind before the text as well as his feelings during that time in his life by rendering on canvas this image captured mid-flight between the Philippines and Australia where he was to have an artist residency program as part of an Ateneo Artist Grant (La Trobe University Visual Arts Center) a place where he might have first encountered the work of Turner in a museum context. A first in these series of paintings of landscapes, seascapes, nooks and crannies familiar and personal is the use of texts superimposed within or below the artwork reminiscent of the works of contemporary artist Richard Prince (Joke series and Nurse Paintings) but with an altogether different temperament. After the first line for which the title of the work was taken the artist added yet another line – ‘Ang takot sa Diyos ay takot sa sariling multo' – to show his own struggle in coming to terms with faith like the hero in the novel Alyosha who tried to come to terms with his faith after his father's murder. Calubayan manifests this crisis by using contrasting colors thereby blurring boundaries between representation and abstraction like a great turbulent feeling. Like the great Victorian Romantic artist JMW Turner whom he greatly admires, Calubayan's treatment of color comes from the heels of color theory as advanced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German renaissance man, who saw color as visual metaphors of one's perception. In 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Buen Calubayan, through his virtuosity in the use of color and his poetic vision, an inner glow emerges from the canvas as the light embraces the darkness and is at once an affirmation of life poignant, epic and beautiful.