Today is the birth anniversary of J. Elizalde Navarro. The National Artist would have been 101 years old today.
Personally, I found him to be a rather obscure figure among our local painters – or artistes, for that matter. Among the Panayanon National Artists whom I discuss when teaching Contemporary Philippine Arts, his name is usually one of the last to surface. Of course, there would be the ever-revered name of Jovita Fuentes as first among our musicians. Back in December 2019, I was even able to attend the city’s commemorative ceremony for Ramon Muzones’ posthumous conferment of the order for Literature. I’ve had a Kasilag in the classroom who claims the musician was a distant ancestor.
And then there is J. Elizalde Navarro, hailing from Antique.
A quick Google search of samples of his artworks will give you images overflowing with swathes and splashes of bold and brash colors, where abstraction meets with conventional figurative images: the vivaciousness of Navarro’s palettes veneers even the most somber of his subjects with a sheen of gaiety and verve.
Last December 2024, National Museum of the Philippines Iloilo’s Fine Arts Gallery opened an exhibition solely dedicated to his art. I was in a hurry that time, and with only a cursory glance at the colorful frames of prints and abstractions, the collection certainly merited a second and more in-depth perusal and exploration.
Titled Halángdon, the exhibit introduces the viewer to a selection of Navarro’s artworks which essentially exemplify the standards of the Order of National Artist, that which are ‘exalted, great, praiseworthy, respectable, honorable, or excellent,’ as the Hiligaynon dictionary would give as viable translations for the adjective. It is grandiloquent branding – and we may be enticed into the trap of conjecturing what constitutes as ‘great’ or ‘excellent’ in Navarro’s works.
If this will be the objective of the author’s criticism, then we look first into what constitutes the exhibit: there is the bulk of prints and serigraphs, and the engraved matrices and steel plates from which these impressions were made. There are the occasional abstract works rendered in paint or mixed media, and a singular watercolor. A solitary sculptural assemblage stands in the middle of the room. An eclectic selection – but where does greatness keep itself in this aesthetic jumble?
With a good number of these hanging on the walls, the prints and serigraphs easily capture the viewer’s gaze. In a Daily Guardian article about printmaking published last year, truly yours mentioned the unique characteristic of the artform, which is “the capacity of the printer to render multiple ‘iterations’ or prints of his designs, removing the singularity of execution usually identified with traditional painting or sculpture.” In Navarro’s works, we find the same aesthetics come into play.
The disfigurement of faces and the distortion of the human form are recurrent in modern and contemporary art – and of course, a favorite subject in many a print and serigraph – if only to explore and project the sundry aspects of the human psyche. These too recur in Navarro’s works. In printer’s ink or acrylic paint, these projections of the physical Self are almost autobiographical of the artist. His portraits (or disfigurements?) of men, women, and monsters appear to be interpretations or projections of encounters, either in real life or through a surreal lens which reveal a spectrum of emotions: euphoria, melancholia, pathos, nostalgia.
Of course, there are artworks of a different aesthetic provenance. For instance, Sunday in the Park, an acrylic abstraction with hints of Kandinsky or de Kooning seem like a page torn out of a doodled coloring book tinted by a color expert. On the adjacent end of the panel hangs a somber watercolor of the shoreline of San Jose Buenavista, the only artwork in the exhibit to harken back to the traditionally representational. Collages of sundry images lend a catholicity of themes and elements to the artworks on display.
Standing as the lone statuary of the collection, Desaparacidos is a solitary tower of metal. Constructed of welded strips of bronze compacted to form adjoined quasi-rhomboid figures, the column exudes a roughness in texture and a certain hushed sentimental violence in the folds and layers of its metallic weaves. Sculpted in 1999, the work aspires to an interpretation of the endurant price of struggle, of wanting to transcend and break out of an oppressive cycle held together by fragile seams – an abstruse memorial of the ‘salvaged’ and the lost. It stands there in the middle of all the vibrance and color of ink and paint, a watchful sentinel of iron folds and coils, ever-hearkening back into the nation’s dark and painful historic episodes that we hope never to see again.
At the far corner of the gallery, an empty exhibit shelf covered with a translucent glass pane displays a short poem written by the artist and published in The Varsitarian in 1948. Aptly entitled Interpretation, it somehow offers a literary synthesis to the myriad of frames and the lone statuary standing in the middle of it.
this is an impasto
of life
not fractional concepts
nor genuflecting values
against hollowed depths…
One can almost sense the lumps and swathes that build up the corpus of Navarro’s works. No formal categorizations, no ethical inhibitions, no moralistic dictums: only the sheer exuberance of line, hue, color, figure, geometry, pattern, and contrasts – as if this one gallery will contain and condense all of the vastness of spirit that moved his paint and pen to draw and deliver.
…this is telescoping
space with experience
to form a tactile whole
of cold dismembered faculties…
Always, the enduring essentials: the everlasting brokenness of things, the shards and shreds of our beings, the parts and parcels of our sentiments, the odds and ends of our memories.
The interplay between the visual and the literary aspires to an elementary Gesamtkunstwerk: the materiality of images juxtaposed with the nebulousness of narrative to achieve a coherent wholeness in the exhibit. It was as if ink and paint required a more linguistic medium to encapsulate what escapes the human eye in its discernment of meaning. Crossing the barriers between semiotics and linguistics while held together by abstraction, the curation digs deep into Navarro’s zeitgeist, framing his gifts as visual artist and his flair as poet, to give credence that truly, these works are the measures of his artistic excellence. The exhibit’s wholeness is J. Elizalde Navarro interpreting existence: to capture this in mediums defying the ephemeral is his greatness.
And so we say this to describe his art: halángdon gid!
Additional photos of the artworks by Shas Hobilla.
