Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

ABOUT THE WORK

The color blue has always been a medium to express one’s emotion in art, since antiquity. For blue, is not a mere color of peace, but rather captures the livid fantasies that can baffle the inner mind and can even touch the emotions of its viewer. For the greater part of her artistic life, the artist Nena Saguil utilized this color of such varied connotations into depicting her own fantasies and visions unto the canvass. Upon her decision to permanently reside in Paris, Saguil was motivated to breakout from the mold of her more illustrious male contemporaries: Hernardo R. Ocampo, Galo Ocampo and Cesar Legaspi who were becoming respective vanguards of the Philippine Neo-Realist School. Saguil ventured into more contemplation in her art through her fervent readings of realist literature and fictions George Elliot, Somerset Maugham, Immanuel Kant and even the Marquis de Sade made available in her fervent visits to the Malraux Library, a stone thrown away from her apartment. In the process of obsessive readings, Saguil embarked into producing a series of monochromatic abstractions in color blue, thus beginning of her “Blue Period’. For the artist, the color blue as showcased in this work from 1971 symbolizes healing and solace, that actuated with the monochromatic orbs and spheres that form a labyrinth of planets and stars that are spread out representing the infinite galaxies, by which Saguil gives us a glimpse into. Here, Saguil depicts the galaxies being subsumed by orbs that serve as black holes engulfing the smaller stars and planets into its vortex, but is being defeated by radiant light of the white sun as it begins to brighten the darkness. Critic Emmanuel Torres recounted in a retrospective of the artist, he comments on this phase of Saguil’s works: “Just as H.R. Ocampo used to boast that nobody painted red the way he did, Saguil could claim the same for blue in its monochrome densities and subtleties” (as published in Nena Saguil: Landscapes and Inscapes: From the Material World to the Spiritual by Emmanuel Torres. Ateneo Art Gallery, 2003).