Provenance: Private Collection, Makati City

ABOUT THE WORK

The paradox in Zobel’s art is that his complicated theories have produced paintings of an apparently elementary simplicity. Painted subject and real subject identify with each other in abstract synthesis, in colossal confrontation with the loss of the ability to attribute reality to the thing, the lost recollection of this almost divine faculty. What Fernando Zobel presents for contemplation is the result of an inner experience, be the subject the landscape in nature or in a painting. Paring his means down to basics, Zobel produced images that anticipated Minimalism and Zen yet still bearing a quiet resilience and vitality.