Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by Ambassador and Mrs. J.V. Cruz Christies, Asian 20th Century Art, Hong Kong, 31 May 2015, Lot 456

Literature: Paras-Perez, Rod., Manansala, PLC Publications, Manila, Philippines, 1980 p. 89 (illustrated)

ABOUT THE WORK

Manansala’s art is proof that if a painting is going to be abstract at all it doesn’t have to be totally so, with no connection whatsoever with the world of visible reality. Manansala fits in the human figures by means of distortion and changes in scale and proportion to the general design. In a style which is representational but not realist, Manansala was concerned with conveying the essence of the feral sport known as sabong. Vicente Manansala’s themes are immersed in the Philippine milieu like the sabong (cockfight). In the postwar years through the 1950s, the artist lived in San Francisco del Monte, in a house overlooking a creek. Here, he did a lot of watercolors on roosters and hens, singly or in pairs. This was probably a carryover from the favorite theme among genre painters at the time, the sabongero and his gamecock. It is the sabong as much as the sabongeros that is the thematic focus. The usual icon of the sabongero is a rural fellow with a kerchief tied around head, seated on haunches, and holding his gamecock. Regardless of the fragmentation, Manansala retained the suggestion of form and identity of the main subject matter. There are hints of the details of the faces but they remain hints. Manansala fragmented the surface into multiple color planes, using the relationship between the color, shape and space to create a texture that emphasizes the play of light, which in turn gives the painting a multidimensional quality. “Sabongero” exemplifies the artist’s ability to convey the significance of the fleeting moment — notably in this painting, through the body language of the chickens.