Original is the betterment of what already is. In context, visual artist Blaine San Luis unearths a rectified medium. Take a bowl of soup. It is plain boiled broth. But garnish some ABC, and it becomes an alphabet soup. Adjustment is originality's spell, in relation to San Luis's works, indicative of cubism and modernism melded into a movement de novo — neonism: always evolving, and therefore, new. Art inspires art, like a San Luis correlated to an Ang Kiukok (National Artist in Visual Arts) is very magical; and the magic is visualizing how to perfect another stylistic approach and eventually create a newer piece from it.
From Inspiration to Perfection
For San Luis, who was a pupil at the University of the Philippines, original is but a lore. There is only the application of a painter’s own scheme to personalize an existing style, which San Luis believes is an art form — perfectionism. No one approach can dictate the art or the artist’s concept, rather, it is the pile of every stroke that underlines the essence of the figures and its creator. He is inspired by other art makers, as evoked on the strokes adorning his pieces. Where Kiukok embodies desolation and wrath through angry brushes, the stirred San Luis betters the craft by chiseling the rough rims to finer planes of solace plus harmonized concaves. His are concentrated marks, almost atomic is the peacefulness inside his drawings. To him, another's work is peering into its anatomy. The art’s body unconcealed as San Luis peaks the bare ligaments and wires of its sketched machinery, sans the batteries because it is the artist who will provide it — the core — through their skim. Stripped to its nakedness, down to the skeleton, before him is not a carcass but a canvas, then he supplies meat and complexion to his own artwork.
How Antiquity Contributes to Originality
In “Struggle for Bounty,” three sapiens strain for netted fish. The figures have highlighted shapes that are rounded, indicative of furnished perfection. Also, there are triangles in the fishes and surroundings, speaking about the transcendent slots — these expressive areas date back to the holes dug when San Luis struggled in his artistic quest. He used to tread rural grounds and scour mountaintops in the Philippines, hunting earthen antiques: plates, jars, 18th century aparadors, and ancient altar tables among other flummeries. Imminently, a turnover came through the Estrada administration when the artist says his antiquity venture and creativity hit a slump; the slump is the parallel of the mountains he excavated, planes that are now fossilized in his works such as “Struggle for Bounty” and “Sto. Nino.” These are prominent for their utter semblance, that how ever looked at balances the prisms in San Luis’s cubic modernization.
Antiquities are blessings to the artist. Through the olden furniture and knickknacks unfurl ponderings on its magnificence whilst their graying features. That is where originality is most animate. Because in spite of a thing fading lingers bygones that can be witnessed through the olden wares repossesed by San Luis. So inspired by, San Luis offers a reassembled antique with heavenly continuum that broadens so long as his cubes are much eloquent. Despite painted and drawn, San Luis’s pictures are wooden. “Self-Reflection” has the light lacquer texture of a Narra log penciled into a curled human. It asks of the instinct to go on nevermind being frozen into contemplation. Nothing waits, not even the artist when he is on the move as a perfectionist. Think of a furnace — it has been there before the fire. Frizzle a blaze in a bid to wizen the frisk. But the flame is not the same burn during every ignition as you scorch up another heat in the fireplace. Therefore, the fire is afresh until there comes the perfect heat which can be encountered once until a match strikes up the next flame. It is the fire that perfects the furnace, as San Luis does in his works.
Finding Pulso
Inspiration sires creation. It happens that San Luis burst later than the pictures that spurred him, thus having the perchance of consummating the originals, resulting in the coherence in his modern strokes; the pulse or pulso. The artist found his pulso throughout a lifetime, the bearing of a tree tattooed with woes. For him, pulso separates the creator from another maker. It is that sanctifying feel in their canvas both familiar and recent because it is a whim belonging to the artist. So neonism is akin to jazz: evergreen, fresh, changing, a revisionist but sees to what more can be done aside from what is. “Bounty Harvest,” a person carrying farmland crops, has an unconventional execution. San Luis brushes angular complexities that are rousingly young to evoke a perpetuity covering both new and old. He is neither, maybe the in-between, never winding but anew. That is the aftermark of a perfectionist.
Images Evolve in Neonism
Neonism measures perfection’s flexibility. Among San Luis’s favorite subjects are windows and doors, he colorizes these in his images “Blue Room” and “Yellow Cabinet.” In the former, the door is lastingly open, accentuated by the blue shade. It is about bright tomorrows, the artist states. But dare to stare further. The door does not have a hinge and will not close regardless which way the panel goes. Is it inviting us to come in or to escape to a blazing hereafter? It is the unknown breathing more wonder than discovery, the excitement of innocence shading perplexities within. The second painting, “Yellow Cabinet,” is unevenly constructed. Somehow lunatic, the drawer and cabinet is both agape, containing nothing. It does not matter if it is brimming or whatnot, San Luis pinpoints the irregularities of the cabinet, though the structure perfectly stands firm. Its olden yellow is the stamp of withering and crispness. The furniture ripples yet evolves; steadying amid a longer gloat.
Perfectionism is the Freedom to Make
Artistry is improvement; this is the philosophy of San Luis. Of course there will be painters with their movements, but it is the pursuit of betterment that quells San Luis’s creative gluttony. His portraits are varnish, on and on pacifies mayhem with every passing. Really, it is freedom that is focal in his perfectionism. The liberty to do any piece, about any subject, using any palette knife (he uses three types in his works). Being free to make is evolution — the ability to sire visualties that are freely captivating. For it to be perfect, San Luis manages a curing method so he could layer over and again, developing then balancing the original and the alternative. Perfection does not rest but reoccurs. Testing recurrence and versatility, Blaine San Luis wants to get into modern sculpture, a testament to his evolutionary interest. By and by, he keeps his colors more alive. His compositions are forthcoming, a kaleidoscope of has been and will be.
Images
“Struggle for Bounty”| “Struggle for Bountiful Harvest” Blaine San Luis, 2020, oil on canvas
C/O Art Circle Gallery
“Yellow Cabinet” and “Blue Room”
Blaine San Luis, 2003, oil on canvas
C/O Art Circle Gallery
Originally published by Art Circle Gallery.
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