Translucency

Diaphanous #146 (1978, Romulo Olazo)

                    While the pleasure of a Javanese meal derives in part from the ornate medley of spices, the pleasure of a Tagalog or Visayan meal is more subtle. The faint sourness does not totally hide the natural flavor of the fish or the meat. It half reveals the juices, half conceals them. This quality that I call “translucency” appears as well in our other art forms. Even the houses of wealthy nineteenth-century Filipinos does not have the gold-encrusted, jungle-like lushness of the carved screens and walls of Javanese and Balinese palaces. Instead interior wall transoms have strips of lacelike tracery, often in natural finish and exterior walls with sliding window panels whose flat capiz shell panes half-reveal, half-conceal the landscape while catching its shadows. Our traditional textiles in Luzon and the Visayas do not have the silk, the gold, or the ornate vegetation of batik. Rather they are delicate gauzes, as in piña, jusi, and sinamay, which tease the beholder’s eyes, particularly when they have cutwork embroidery. Filipino paintings of the twentieth century, be this the late Cubism of Manansala, the stylized Realism of Carlos Francisco, or the gauzy Abstractions of Chabet, Albor, and Olazo, echo this diaphanousness. 

                    Whoever expects the visual and gustatory spectacle that characterizes particular Southeast Asian art forms will be disappointed by Filipino art. This is not the case, however, if he relishes the subtle play of overlapping filmlike surfaces whether in food or in the visual arts. Or if he enjoys seeing light hovering, in its various moods–around the body, in a room or on canvas. The theme of translucency runs through nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Filipino couture and architecture; it is manifest in twentieth-century painting since Amorsolo. This should be explored.

Fernando Nakpil Zialcita
On the Filipino aesthetic

Authentic Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity