Provenance: The Luz Gallery

ABOUT THE WORK

The difference between the abstractions of Lee Aguinaldo to that of Joya was his rejection of the layered, gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism. The rationality in his luminous canvases was wholly new. Naturally, Joya goes out of his way to elicit an intense reaction from his audience; you can see it from the way he works with paint. He puts more emotion into his paintings. Lee Aguinaldo’s paintings are meant more for a serene and logical response. To quote Cid Reyes: |With this particular effect, the artist is able to achieve light, ethereal effects or luminous passages in the thin films of color that filter the light from the surface to increasing depths. “To use hip lingo, Joya is “hot” whereas Aguinaldo is “cool”.” Aguinaldo’s painting is spare, quite distinctive in terms of color sensibility and paint quality. For Aguinaldo, color is a tangible and sufficient physical presence and, when compounded in planar arrangements, would engage its perceiver in an objective and analytical exercise. Working in oil, Aguinaldo places great emphasis on eliminating brushwork and all visible evidence of handling, aiming for a totally flat and even skin of pigment that maintains the integrity of the picture plane. There is no attempt to create any more than the bare essentials of picture space; the geometric quality of the frame, with its right angles, makes for order, hence, conscious rationality. For Lee Aguinaldo, too elaborate a spatial framework as much as excessive use of color, decoration, or narrative, could detract from the picture’s power. Aguinaldo favored the square format for his landscape paintings. Not by chance and not for convenience. This format makes it possible to bathe the subject in an atmosphere of rationality. Through the square, the picture becomes part of a universal whole. And botanical details painted create a sense of matter extending to infinity. The artist seems to say that a subject can be expressed through angles, lines, and slick color surfaces. The audience is more fully enjoy pure form, pure color and pure arrangement because they are less diverted by incidental interests. His bold, colorful, minimalist work is deceptively direct visually, yet it provides an extraordinary impact on the viewer. Art critic Cid Reyes, in one of a series of conversations published in 1989 by the CCP, asked Aguinaldo: “One of the hallmarks of your paintings is the gloss and slickness of their surface. One often fears that they may be scratched, dented or bruised. Have any of your paintings been damaged?” Agunaldo answered: “I had a show once in Northern Motors. Somebody walked in with a can of white paint and splashed it all over my paintings. The paintings were damaged completely beyond repair. How did you react to your paintings being vandalized? Well, somebody obviously disliked my paintings intensely enough to bother buying a can of white paint and vandalizing them. I’m flattered, in retrospect, of course, that my paintings should have generated such violent feelings in someone.” CR: Your most recent paintings had a very limited range of colors… LA: It’s good discipline, it’s like Zen exercise. CR: Why blue and green? LA: Well, why not? I find blue and green very compatible with each other, like black and white. Cid Reyes asked further: Will you keep on doing you minimal paintings or do you think you might revert to your early Pollock period? LA: I have no idea. Who knows? I might even end up doing children’s art. I might even end up in an insane asylum.