Provenance: :
Galleria Duemila, Inc.

ABOUT THE WORK

As equally fascinating as Romulo Olazo's exceptional musing and unswerving creativity on the Diaphanous series is his exploration of the same body of work, this time in the black-and-white style. Olazo's artistic fascination with a monochromatic palette originated in 1971. That year, Olazo produced a series of 69 black-and-white collagraph prints and mounted them in a two-man show with Rodolfo Samonte in Hidalgo Gallery in May of the same year. This black-and-white series of collagraphs would continue until 1974, when Olazo produced the last of its kind, B&W #LXIX. Four years later, in 1978, Olazo would showcase two 7 x 8-foot black-and-white paintings, Diaphanous B-I and Diaphanous B-11, at a Cultural Center of the Philippines exhibition titled Philippine Abstract Art. He would also join the First Friday Group's An Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures at the Museum of Philippine Art (MOPA). At that event, Olazo would present seven black-and-white paintings: Diaphanous B-III, B-IV, B-V, and B-VI (5 ft x 5 ft) and Diaphanous Nos. 135, 136, 137, and 140 (3.3 ft x 2.5 ft). This particular piece titled Black and White Diaphanous belongs to that period of Olazo's career when he constantly steered his palette towards a monochromatic style. Here, Olazo exploits the potential of oil as a medium to engender a dazzling luminosity. The artist expounded this practice in a statement upon bequeathing a black-and-white work titled Diaphanous B-XXII to the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Olazo expressed: "I am continuously concerned with the quality of materials I work on to achieve an overall effect of mystery, mood, and contemplation." The harmonious intermingling of black and white and cohesive application of paint in this work produce a kind of lighting that plays with varying degrees of opacity. In its black and white form, Olazo presents the Diaphanous in its most ethereal, persisting in its essence of delicacy and translucence. Playing with the expanse of lightness and darkness, the artist contrives a graceful dance of light with mellow and subdued passages of shadow. Due to Olazo's delicate manipulation of tone, texture, and forms, the piece seemingly evokes a place of quietude and a period of halcyon. In 1981, four years after creating this piece, the leading art critics of Olazo's time, Leo Benesa, Rod. Paras-Perez, and Emmanuel Torres selected him as among the "Five Outstanding Living Artists in the Philippines. He was the youngest in a selection that included other towering artists Ang Kiukok, Cesar Legaspi, Arturo Luz, and Napoleon Abueva. Rod. In Critics' Choice '81: 5 outstanding living artists, Paras-Perez writes: "Olazo has achieved a complete oneness of technique and substance. Or of meaning, content ... and style.....” Like the calming spectrum of Olazo's distinctive forms, the Diaphanous immortalizes what Alice Guillermo described as the "singular genius of an artist, likewise a gentle, well-loved personality, much respected by his peers." (A.M.)