This piece is accompanied by a certificate issued by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

A polished darkness. Turbulent roughness. Abstract elements of texture and tone add richness to the painting. His work has a sense of energy and intensity about it that is not found in the body of work of his father, Romulo Olazo. Its intense concentration links microcosm to macrocosm. A tension arises between order and chaos, finesse and crudeness, controlling reason and arbitrary impulse, with an unpredictable, irrational core. In this image of mystical evocation of the ancient past and the cosmic future converge, as they reveal an underlying similarity of its structures. The play of tones creates an unstable shifting quality. Movement is a physical presence in the canvas. As if the father’s road had completely been taken, Jonathan Olazo steered a different course: abstraction that courted and savored formlessness, an adventurousness in the choice of materials, a transformation of surface and ground, soliciting implications beyond being a vessel and receptacle for pigments and other unexpected ingredients such as indeterminate substances, and, of course, the confounding and irreverent titles that he bestows on the works that appropriate meanings unto themselves and tantalize the viewer. Olazo’s abstraction is characterized by a pursuit of balance between the sheer tangible physicality of colors and the intangible metaphysicality of man’s perceptions. There are no recognizable representations in the canvas. The color, instead of being decoratively “beautiful” seems turgid, the drawing coarse and heavy handed. “I tend to prefer simple, direct works, and seminal statements that have unsettled our concept of history. In contemporary sculpture, I mostly appreciate works that are sober, continue to mark decisive stages and enrich theoretical thinking. Works that do not merely appeal to the intellect but engage the sensorial with equal force.” “There, the radicalness of its concept and the thought it engenders are the perfect match for the works’ pictorial quality.” Jonathan Olazo’s exultation is in clashing energies. In this painting Jonathan Olazo is at once an expressionist and an abstractionist.