It all starts with a line. In geometry, a line is a straight curve, a line with no wiggles. In the real world, it is the idealization of objects with insignificant width and height and objects that are deemed infinitely long. It is also considered a very fundamental concept in Euclidean geometry. In the mind’s eye and training of visual artists, a line is the very start of a would-be magnum opus. From a line comes forth numerous works of art we now see in revered museums and art caches.

For National Artist and visionary Arturo Luz, the line is the nucleus of his non-objective and minimalist repertoire. And utilizing it has rendered him a celebrated aesthetic that is elegantly streamlined, subdued, and simple—just like the artist himself.

Proof of this is Luz’s sparse and modern home, resembling the architectural theme of the Design Center of the Philippines where the artist once served as executive director. Only, where the Design Center’s concrete walls have remained unpainted and austere, Luz’s abode is a stand-out in pristine white. Truth of the matter is it’s as if the artist’s house is one of his sculptures done in behemoth proportions.  It’s as if large blocks of cubes have been stacked and coalesced to form a unifying structure.

Three new steel sculptures, one a shaft and the other two in cube forms mounted on metal pedestals that Luz had also designed, are ready to greet visitors in the house’s threshold. There is little ornamentation inside the octogenarian’s residence-cum-studio. Its white walls are adorned only by some of his paintings and on its floors are small versions of his geometric sculptures. Emphasis on intersecting planes and lines are made possible by a dramatic lighting. The house is stripped of all but the most essential elements.

And just like his reductivist house, only the most necessary and indispensable elements are seen in the national icon’s opuses, whether they be paintings, collages, prints, or sculptures. From the get-go, Luz has made his sensibility lucid to viewers and art connoisseurs, saying that he is “totally modern, linear, abstract, and geometric. These are what I am all about.” His erudite art creations embody sophistication, characterized by meticulous simplicity in expression and in form. But whereas his early oeuvre has been bare from an explosion of colors, his latest three-dimensional works now sport primary brights of red and blue and citrus hues of yellow and orange—fashioned as such to be prominent in the public spaces they define and character to.

Luz, however, didn’t start with abstraction at the onset of his artistic sojourn; he began with figuration and opted to have lessons in painting under the brother of the late National Artist Fernando Amorsolo, Pablo. But his lessons were marred a bit by Pablo being late in most of their meetings. Luz fondly recalls how Pablo’s older brother Fernando would always welcome him in his home and offered him something to drink while waiting for his teacher.

“Well, being the older brother who happened to be a very gentle and polite person, Fernando was always apologetic that his brother was always late meeting me. I can’t remember why we would meet in Fernando’s house but that is usually where I met Pablo. He was always late,” he reminisces. “And so Fernando would always come out into the sala and apologize to me and gave me water, brought me all his sketchbooks, which are very beautiful, and put them on a coffee table. And I enjoyed that,” he adds.

Luz then studied painting at the University of Santo Tomas’ College of Fine Arts and furthered his studies at the California College of Arts and Craft in Oakland under a three-year diploma art scholarship program. It was in Oakland where Luz took courses in modeling and in sculpture, this proved to be instrumental in Luz’s shift from one medium to another. “Also after having worked a lot, I realized that sculpture came very easily to me. So going from painting and collages to sculptures was a very simple and natural process,” he explains. “The only difference is the material and this is why, at this stage in life, you can ask me to do anything with any material and I will do it. The principles are always the same; it is only the materials that differ.”

Luz’s schooling from different institutions abroad, in New York, Paris, and in Spain, paved for him a successful career path and a creative schema that fuses neo-realist, modern susceptibility with local and Asian flavors. His travels overseas—from Europe, Cambodia, Thailand, and Indonesia to ancient cities in India, Pakistan, and Nepal—have produced paintings that arrested the stillness and palpable opulence of cityscapes and edifices. He has done collages on paper using acrylic and has been able to use various materials such as hardwoods, marble, and metal for his sculptures. And more importantly, Luz has successfully streamlined and updated Philippine art that is entrenched in ornate and flamboyant modes—and gained critical success upon doing so.

Known also for his Performers series of paintings where musicians, acrobats, and cyclists are his main subjects, Luz is now slated to mount an exhibit this November at the Crucible Gallery to re-showcase the same series he conceptualized 19 years ago in large-scale sculptures. “Six months ago, I decided to enlarge my studies in metal and in steel to sculptures that are quite tall. In addition to that, I’m going to show a lot of recent collages (which we saw as very much multicolored).”

However, Luz stresses that he doesn’t work for shows. “I don’t have to work for it because all the works already exist, they are there already. Shows just become by-products of what I do,” he tells.

Asked what reward and satisfaction he gets from continuing to produce pieces that define his progressive 57-year career and shape Filipino art, Luz answers: “Can you imagine doing something out of nothing? Out of nothing I created this (pointing to a collage). And what does this consist of? A pair of scissors, paste, and some paper. It’s no big deal, but out of all those scraps of paper, I’ve done a collage. It is something. It is the same with painting. Out of my mental file, my gut, and my heart, I imagine the things I have seen and create drawings from it, and those drawings become paintings. I can stay in this room for the next 20 years and paint without looking at anything. You see, I do not do paintings from things that I see, only from things that I remember. Only from what I conceive and what I invent, never what’s in front of me.”

And when asked why his aesthetic has remained ascetic an frugal throughout the years, Luz says: “To me that is the best way to do anything. To be simple in life is the best.” And also in his own words, “but it’s the most difficult.” But if you’re the Arturo Luz, to be simple, well, seems just plain easy.