By Dr. Jaime C. Laya

There’s an ongoing exhibit at the Ayala Museum, “Curated by Federico de Vera.” The man is a New Yorker from Dagupan, a UST architecture graduate described as “aesthetic savant” and “design alchemist” for his work as jeweler, exhibition designer, and publisher, and his Manhattan shop that offers extraordinary objects from all over the world to the rich and famous.

Lonely Planet describes him as traveling “the globe in search of rare and exquisite jewelry, carvings, lacquerware, and other objets d’art for this jewel-box of a store.” I haven’t been there but it’s been called an exquisite museum with illuminated vitrines containing treasures that one can take home.

Beauty and Craftsmanship clockwise from top left: Portraits (including Fang-Od, third from the left, top row); solid gold mosquito net hooks; images of Sto. Niño and the Pieta; a bulul and Heavenly Hell by Jigger Cruz.

The same discriminating eye recently surveyed Philippine art collections and selected “art and objects found in the Philippines regardless of form, material, age, or provenance where disparate objects, when brought together, made a sensible story.”  In putting the exhibit together, de Vera says he sought “to find great art, to uncover beauty and craftsmanship, and most important, to rediscover my own heritage” and help the museumgoer “understand better why Filipino art is so distinctive.”

Perceptively writing in the exhibit catalogue, businessman, decorator, and creative consultant Cesar “Junie” Rodriguez, Jr. likens the exhibit to John Tradescant’s “Cabinet of Curiosities” at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

Such cabinets (small rooms, actually) began to be formed in the 1400s by Lorenzo de’ Medici and his contemporaries who coveted “sculpture and paintings; “curious items from home and abroad,” and “antlers, horns strange and curious animals.”

Indeed, the 300 items at the Ayala Museum date from as early as 200 A.D. to as recent as 2017.  They include oils by Juan Luna (1880s) and by Gregory Halili (2016, a skull painted on mother-of-pearl shell); the super-rare 1734 Murillo-Velarde map; a group of 20th century bululs from the Cordilleras and a recently woven Tingguian textile; a stuffed Batangas paniqui (fruit bat) and a Mindanao kalaw (hornbill) from the UST Museum; paper flowers from recycled magazines; newspapers transformed into a lamp by Tony Gonzales, plastic dolls transformed into the sculpture of a pig’s head by Carmela Dagdag.

We also appreciate foreign works—18th European religious paintings, a portrait by Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi, a 200 A.D. Gandhara Bodhisattva (from Northwest Pakistan) and a Burmese seal. Conspicuously absent though are chinoiserie that used to fill our homes.

The exhibit begins with portraits of city and rural folk, young and old, indigenous and westernized Filipinos, 19th century elite and 21st century poor, hung with depictions of where and how they lived. Then follow tangible manifestations of our Catholic faith—household, church and processional images (many of ivory), silver objects, thickly embroidered vestments.

It concludes with design parallels between old and new, ethnic and modern, the luxurious and utilitarian. Speaking volumes are the solid gold mosquito net hooks and silver toothpick holders of lowland ilustrados across the aisle from the humble rattan lime containers (tabayag) that sustained Cordillerans toiling in steep mountain terraces, like the care-worn but proud Fang-Od photographed by Jake Verzosa.

Notes: (a) “Curated by Federico de Vera” is on at the Ayala Museum until Jan. 28; and (b) The exhibit has 11 tabayag of different designs, evidently considered unworthy of being properly illustrated in the Catalogue.

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