PROPERTY FROM THE LEONARDO AND ARMIDA SIGUION-REYNA COLLECTION

Provenance:
A gift from the artist to Leonardo Siguion-Reyna

ABOUT THE WORK

As a master of both academic representational style and modern abstraction, Napoleon Abueva transformed and shaped Filipino sculpture. By using indigenous and modern materials, Abueva created sculptures that adhered to a modernist approach integrated into his Filipino sensibility. Abueva deeply admired marble for its luminosity, durability, and natural physical properties. With marble, Abueva was able to create sculptures with excellent polish. Its malleable yet sturdy quality allows it to be easily sculpted, with uniform properties in all directions when fine-grained. Being identified with Modernism that emphasized awareness of our national sensibility, Abueva’s heightened consciousness of our identity and culture can be discerned in this piece depicting the “Code of Kalantiaw,” a mythical pre-colonial system of punishment in the Maragtas epic. This piece is Abueva’s marble rendition of his iconic “Code of Kalantiaw” (1953) which was among the artist’s earlier works and one of his entries to the 7th AAP Annual Art Exhibition. The sculpture is a “drawing in space,” employing symbolic representations of the sun, anthill, crocodile, whip, and boiling water – instruments of punishment inflicted for the crimes committed by pre-colonial natives. Despite its refuting by historian William Henry Scott in the late 1960s, Abueva’s depiction of the code is wildly imaginative – one that has undoubtedly made a picturesque subject for the artist’s work. National Artist Francisco Arcellana writes in one of the earliest written critiques of Abueva’s work: “There is no end to [the] Code of Kalantiao as a piece of sculpture… [It] celebrates a new consciousness in the sculptor; a new consciousness with the old detachment.” Although Abueva was at the forefront of Modernism in Philippine sculpture, he constantly rejected such designation, saying: “One’s imagination and feeling towards a certain subject should be interpreted in one’s chosen medium, irrespective of the prevailing style of the period as the subject is best fitted for execution, for a good piece of art transcends any period and has perpetual value.” Either in figurative or abstract, Abueva’s works evoke potency and sensitivity en masse.