Provenance: Provenance: Galleria Duemila

ABOUT THE WORK

The color field sensibility in Lee Agunaldo paints surfaces that are ethereal; revealing at the edges, under layers of the same color, a rich density and hue that seem to allow the painting to glow from within. At this stage in his career, Aguinaldo “departed from Pollock” to produce coolly elegant works that were disembodied not only physically — witness the thin hues — but metaphorically as well. The combination of rationality and sensuality in his luminous canvas was wholly new. The difference between the abstractions of Lee Aguinaldo to that of Joya was his rejection of the layered; 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. For Lee Aguinaldo, an elaborate spatial framework or an excessive use of color, decoration, or narrative, could detract from the picture’s power. The artist seems to say that a subject can be expressed through angles, lines, and slick color surfaces. The audience now could be more fully engaged to pure form, pure color and pure arrangement because they are less diverted by incidental interests. His bold, minimalist work is deceptively direct visually, yet it provides an extraordinary impact on the viewer. 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. Aguinaldo favoured 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. In his color fields, Lee Aguinaldo generates profound psychological and philosophical meaning through amorphous expanses of space. Art critic Cid Reyes, in one of a series of conversations published in 1989 by the CCP, told Aguinaldo: “One of the hallmarks of your paintings is the gloss and slickness of their surface. Cid Reyes continues: Your most recent paintings had a very limited range of colors... LA: It’s good discipline, it’s like Zen exercise.