Accompanied by a certificate issued by Mrs. Luisa Luz-Lansigan confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist

ABOUT THE WORK

An acclaimed pioneer of modernism in Philippine Art alongside contemporaries like Vicente Manansala, Cesar Legaspi, H.R. Ocampo, and Romeo Tabuena, Arturo Luz embodied the transformative spirit of neo-realism that emerged in the 1950s. At that time, artists sought to paint a new vision of reality as the aftermath of the war entailed a rebuilding of Manila’s city space that brought along with it a changing sociopolitical landscape. This new vision, however, did not mean a total departure from reality, a retreat into fancy— nor a mere escape from the horrors of war. Instead, for the neo-realists, the abstractions of their making were intimations into nature and the social landscape that worlded them as subjects. Because such works were necessarily inflected with an individuality that drew from the subconscious, the neo-realist was thus closer to reality than ever. It is a character very much exemplified in the works of Arturo Luz whom art critic and historian Patrick Flores describes as having a “feeling for form.” Owing to his educational background in design practice, Luz developed this natural instinct for forms and their interrelations in space which allowed him to make masterfully sound abstract compositions throughout his artistic career: “I suppose that at the end of such training, you develop this instinct for design. It becomes second nature to you…You can sit down and analyze all inter-relations among the different shapes and colors if you wish. You can look at any object, any art, or building even, and analyze it purely in terms of design. But I don’t do this. Everything to me has become instinctive…” The oeuvres of Arturo Luz saw experimentations in various mediums from painting, sculpture, and printmaking to photography and collage. What significantly recurs throughout these various explorations in medium is the technique of improvisation that espoused the spirit of neo-realism and the ethos of design. To improvise means to make do in the moment—and cleverly so, at that. It is also what belies the heart of Luz’s artistic practice: Making do with the scraps of form that the respective medium allows, alongside the sheer creative impulse of the subconscious in the present. Particularly evident in Luz’s collage works, what often materializes on canvas is an artfully sound arbitrariness which art critic Raymundo Albano describes as an ‘open-ended system of ordering’ that presents ever-emerging possibilities. (Pie Tiausas)