Provenance: Private Collection, Makati City

ABOUT THE WORK

Oscar Zalameda’s Flower Vendors encapsulates a celebration of several things: nature’s bountiful blessings, the laborers of the motherland, an homage to one’s native soil, and a yearning for brighter prospects. We see in this piece native Filipinas dressed in the traditional baro’t saya in a display of the harmonious oneness and social cohesion of the people in the countryside, joining hand in hand in their everyday toiling. Their faces are rendered blank, likely instilling in the viewers the significance of empathy and profound solidarity with the laborers of the nation—the movers of society and makers of history. Like many of his works, Flower Vendors also serves as Zalameda’s joyous ode to his native Lucban in Quezon Province. Dubbed the ‘Rice Capital of Quezon,’ Lucban is widely famous for its annual Pahiyas Festival, a week-long celebration in honor of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers and agricultural workers. Houses are decorated with kiping or brightly colored rice wafers, making the Pahiyas one of the world’s liveliest and most vibrant festivals. The Pahiyas is the Lucbanins’ artistic way of thanksgiving for a prolific harvest since agriculture is their primary source of livelihood. Zalameda evokes the spirit of the Pahiyas in this work through his signature employment of flamboyant colors meant to bring out the inherent optimism of his oeuvre and his high-spirited personality. Veering away from the distinct cubist language of his mentor Vicente Manansala, who often imbued his works with a harrowing and bold critique of existing social conditions, Zalameda sees the world as a bastion of hope and elation, a paradise that may be palpably manifested and experienced. As particularly seen in this work, the vendors sit composed and relaxed, signifying the pleasing fulfillment they find in their societal role, with the bright colors of the composition further indicating a prosperous panorama of the pastoral. This is not to say that Zalameda romanticizes the Philippine countryside. However, Zalameda’s colorful rendition of the rural domain resoundingly speaks of visions of golden relief— that like the Pahiyas’ display of social cohesion and solidarity, our yearnings for prosperity can be realized if we stand hand in hand with the ordinary people whose names we do not know and faces we do not recognize yet share with us a common goal toward genuine social emancipation. (Adrian Maranan)