Accompanied by a certificate issued by Luisa Luz-Lansigan confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Arturo Luz's Cities of the Past series reflect the foremost modernist's penchant for breathing new life into forms and images, reinventing them, reconstructing memory, and emphasizing the power of one's creative imagination. Luz says of this series: "These architectural paintings—which I call Cities of the Past—are imaginary landscapes, recollections of my Asian pilgrimages. They have one common element: they are not literal but rather composite images from memory. They are imagined, transformed, invented." It all started in 1988 when Luz embarked on an excursion throughout the Asian continent. At that time, Luz had just resigned from his post as Director of Art at the Museum of Philippine Art (MOPA). Now having the luxury of time, Luz visited several Asian historical sites, including the Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Borobudur in Indonesia, the Sukhothai in Thailand, and the Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim temples of worship in South Asia. Equipped with his photograph, Luz's pictures of those monumental edifices engendered an artistic metamorphosis and reinvention within his creative psyche. Luz started his Cities of the Past in the late 1990s after embarking on his Carnival Forms and Forms of Amusement. As this piece, Burmese Landscape, Yellow Sky, encapsulates, Luz evokes the grandiosity of ancient architectural structures rendered in his minimalist geometric language. Luz depicts a temple complex reminiscent of Shwedagon Pagoda, a UNESCO tentative world heritage site and the most sacred Buddhist pagoda in Myanmar, as it possesses the relics of four Buddhas of our present era (kalpa), including Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. Set against Luz's trademark backdrop of a yellow ochre sky, the structures possess an upward orientation, delineated by well-calculated horizontal and vertical lines that give off a stately and imposing appearance. Although one may initially dismiss it as a cold form of abstraction, Luz's masterful weaving of his calculated lines, mathematical sensibilities, and instincts breathe dynamism through the skyward orientation of his lines and figures. It is, indeed, the artist's grandest in his oeuvre. (A.M.)