Provenance: Private Collection

Exhibited: Museum of Philippine Art (MOPA), Five Directions, Manila, October 31 - December 22, 1980

ABOUT THE WORK

Cesar Legaspi’s Dancing Nude was among the works showcased in the seminal “Five Directions” exhibition held at the Museum of Philippine Art (MOPA) from October 31 to December 22, 1980. Spearheaded by its founding director Arturo Luz, the MOPA’s “Five Directions” was a groundbreaking show as it “put together in one exhibition certain stylistic tendencies moving along similar lines,” writes the exhibit’s curator and eminent art critic Rod. ParasPerez. The show assembled the best and brightest in the Philippine art scene of the post-war period: the NeoRealists, the Non-Objectives, the “Lakeshore” Artists, The Macro-Visionaries/Magic Realists/Hyper Realists, and the CCP Group. Returning to Legaspi’s Dancing Nude, the work is emblematic of the artist’s creative praxis during the 1970s, in which “he referred to objective reality as only as an undertone to his powerful abstract images,” as critic Alicia Coseteng writes in the book Art Philippines. By the 1960s, Legaspi had started to veer towards abstraction, and the 1970s would mark the consummate realization of this style. Legaspi depicts two nude figures, a man and a woman. He weaves Expressionism with his trademark Cubist language, underscoring the Cesar Legaspi. © Tatler Asia intensity of colors and irregularity yet solidity of forms. The Neo-Realist spirit of painting renewed perspectives on the often harsh reality is ever-present in this work. Both figures seemingly merge with the space around them, dancing their way to form one coherent whole. Legaspi’s radical fragmentation results in the overlapping of different elements in the composition, giving birth to an enigmatic harmonious oneness. Although depicting nudes, eroticism is not expressed but what is likely the struggling Filipino collective spirit in the immediate period of post-war rehabilitation, all the more so in the period of dictatorial rule in the 1970s— when this work was painted—in which people from all walks of life confronted in solidarity the contradicting elements of resilience, hope, and anguish brought by the darkness of the socio-economic and socio-political landscape of the time. Coseteng writes in the same monograph: “Legaspi’s leitmotif is a concern for the disinherited, struggling to exist in a harsh world. The social content of his mural reflects the influence of the protest movements of the postwar period.” (Adrian Maranan)