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ed defensor
Reviews
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Excerpts
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Ed Defensor’s “PASALAMAT”: A Continuing Romance with Color & Texture
by Martin G. Genodepa
The art of Edward Defensor has undergone mutations and permutations. His first solo exhibit in 1980 which was an assortment of figurative, landscape and abstract compositions was a foretaste of the many directions he would take in pursuit of artistic bliss. It was also a testament to his prodigious talent. Later he would also include printmaking and sculpture in wood, metal and clay in his repertoire cementing his reputation as a major Ilonggo artist. Defensor’s art is not about doggedly chasing a single vision or style or theme --- it is about self-expression first and foremost. It is about yielding to artistic impulses or forces that tweak his creative instincts and challenge his inventive audacity. Hence the measure of his greatness is in how he is able to excellently reify his myriad epiphanies using various mediums in a variety of art forms.
Defensor’s current exposition of abstract paintings titled "PASALAMAT" will not exactly come as a surprise to his avid followers as he had already staged two solo exhibits that delve into his fascination for the visual art elements of color and texture. In these current works he simply extended the romance with those elements finding new ways to veer away from his previous SUDU (supat kag duag/texture and color) series. The earliest paintings in the SUDU series were generally dark-hued and had a more somber air about them despite smidgens of occasional bright greens and yellows. They were also more studied, contained and controlled. But the later series prior to the current one were already gestural, freer and bursting with light, color, energy, and joy. Such joy and embracement of life, of joie de vivre, continues in the current paintings. Defensor fills his pictorial surfaces with an array of colors and textures and somewhere in the flurry one can find a spot, a focal point, a hub that brings to mind H.R. Ocampo’s obiter dictum on what a good painting is all about: unity, coherence, and emphasis in dynamic equilibrium.
Alfredo Roces once said that an artist’s change in his painting style can only be a reflection of an inward change. By extension any change in an artist’s output can only be a reflection of an inner transformation regardless of its temporality at times. For Defensor, at this point, that change must be in the form of his retirement from the academe after having taught as Associate Professor of Humanities in U.P. Visayas for decades. One can only surmise that the excitement of freedom from the routine of working for a living and the thrilling promise of seemingly endless hours to pursue art and other interests along with the sobering realization of the need to be constantly productive and rage against the constraints of time in the light of one’s boundless dreams and the demand for some semblance of single-mindedness must have asserted their confluence in Defensor’s persona and hence become subtly redolent in his recent works. These new paintings, in general, exude a tempered spontaneity that suggests a wiser bohemian that Defensor must have evolved into. That we do not perceive an ethereality or sense the cosmic or a quiescence of desire about Defensor’s current abstract works which is common among artists in their senior years is suggestive of the artist’s determination to live in the here and the now for we see colors and textures that remind us of the earth, of flowers, of the seasons, of fiestas, of food and even of decay.
Defensor’s current affinity with abstraction must be age-wrought. It parallels the case of writers who through time, after churning stories upon stories, transcend into the realm of poetry to touch base with pure sensations and deep feelings in their psyche. One can sense an indication of transcendence of the poetic kind in Defensor’s current paintings as they pleasure us with a of range textures and colors in varied tones like lyric verses that can be raw at times but never the less heartfelt. We discern in them, too, a calculated distillation of his psychological states and artistic influences. In the current series Defensor does not deny his influences: Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning and Filipino abstract master Jose Joya. In fact he revels in them: “If my works have similarity to theirs, it is intentional. But just similarity, for I have my own temperament, my own milieu, and my own elements. I also believe that there's nothing wrong with being similar with the masters since it is my belief that they precisely came ahead of us so that they could show us the way and show us the light. I also would like to think of these works as an elaboration on, a playing with the works and techniques of the modern masters, the masters I have always held in high esteem and admiration.”
When looking at abstract paintings like Defensor’s it would be helpful to keep in mind what Jackson Pollock said: “Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.” Abstraction emphasizes. Art as form or structure harnessing line, color, texture among other things. Meaning is derived from how these elements are used to create a visual experience that would reverberate in the visceral or emotional and the cerebral or cognitive spheres of the beholder. A large part of the beauty of abstract art is that we can inject our own meaning and assign our own context to paintings like Defensor’s based upon our memories, personalities and experiences. We do not ask what the artist wants to say in the paintings although knowledge of who Defensor is would be helpful and would deepen our appreciation of his art. The most practical and perhaps the best way to enjoy Defensor’s abstract works is to have an inquiring stance yet keeping an open mind and allowing them to transport our imagination to wherever. One blogger passionate about abstraction wrote that “we have in abstract painting the purest and truest interface between visual arts and human consciousness.” Abstract art, hence, is valuable for what it does to the viewer and not for what it represents alone. Abstract art like Defensor’s paintings have to be confronted or experienced therefore as Pollack suggests. Defensor’s current paintings are valuable not only for what they say about his current circumstances as a human being but also for what they can possibly do to us sentient souls.
Ed Defensor’s “Pasalamat”: A Continuing Romance with Color and Texture
by Martin G. Genodepa
UP Views, Official Publication of U.P. Visayas Vol. XI No. 5, July-August 2010. Pp. 3,12.
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