Nude in wood series

We have a stand to make: the medium of art is its genius. Take the medium of Wood: Its genius is equalled only by the genius of the artist. We have here Jerusalino Araos: whose medium—Wood—is his genius.

(If only wood could speak what stories and tales it would tell.)

Do I know Araos’ educational background? Preciously little. That he’s been to college, that he was an ideological undergrounder once, a Filipino Hussar in the struggle to change the government, that he was even a fashion model once. But his artistic background and how he honed himself into a sculptor of extraordinary gifts, he’s self-taught in the Socratic tradition; that’s to say, real education to be true to its intrinsic value is done by the self, to the self, for the self. In short, he educated himself in sculpture.

“Art is flowing water, fluid, conducts electricity” is a Rune saying. That’s the effect of creativity and art: to electrify both its creator and its beholder. Art electrifies, and the higher the voltage of art the more shocked and the more subverted are your sensibilities.  In the Marxist point of view for art to be very effective it must be consistent gayfully with the artist’s humanistic vision translated into the work. It rejects the fragmented reality that bourgeois art tends to present like its patina of hypocrisy. Art synthesizes human nature and experience.

Much art today thrive on visual echoes. There is a much lionized artist, for instance, whose works are gravid with unmistakeable strong echoes of the Mexican Osorio. Perhaps even Araos echoes of other artists, maybe of Maillol, something of Hans Barlach. This is of minor importance.

Influences in art are valid. But copies, parodies, or imitations of other artists’ works passed off as one’s own are criminal.  Like the late diplomat’s plagiarism of another author’s work passed off as his own. What counts in the end is the artist’s genuine sensibility. Elsewhere in art these echoes rampage like wild specters running wild.  There are those artists in painting who believe themselves originators when in truth they dish out only flat one-dimensional art, at the utmost, two-dimensional works.  Their works cardboard paintings without flesh and blood, breathless and frozen, displayed in riots of colors that say nothing.  Like prosy poems brilliantly versified but does not “slough off the top of your head” when read.

Now here’s the sculptor Araos. Who sculpts in Wood.  In the form of the female torso. Certainly it will not make you indulge in the amorphous qualities of the whimsical, in sticky romantic dreams. Nothing of preciosity, nothing pretty or prettified. The Araos Nude offends, it doesn’t titillate your genitalia. Because Araos—he thinks he feels—makes you see the real beauties of the naked female torso—after all, we were originally created beautiful of face and perfect body.  In his Nudes in Wood is elevation of spirit that remains after the initial visual experience.

There are sculptors and sculptors. Always one will top them all. Araos it is… Life could be ugly. In its deeper aspects, deeper reality, the beautiful lies hidden there like an uncut, unrefined diamond. Araos with his Nude crafts for you this beautiful diamond. He lets us peek into his personal jeweled vision. Don’t gaze ravishingly at his Nude. He’s erotic and his eroticism is the refinement of an aesthetic gem. He celebrates life’s totality in his Nude. The wood’s innate genius is drawn out by the artist’s genius. He looks into the wood probingly, discerns its shape, grain, lines, quality, nature, in imagination he already knows what to carve into being. He symbolically makes love to it. That its hidden beauty be revealed. The artist is forever in love with his medium. The love is naturally reciprocated.

His sculpture is so tactile, so full of passion that I see him in my imagination caressing the wood. His keen sense of touch ever growing sensitively with each stroke as he becomes one with it. All this romantic passion is his rage for life. The artist’s tactile sensitivity, his act of touching wood, it must be said, is the high point of an aesthetic love affair. Is he successful; his Nude brightens with neo-classical light, and it exudes with the Greek idea of perfect symmetry rendered in the warm, tactile medium of wood. Yet modern, O, so modern.

In crafting the Nude the artist’s masculine vigor shines. Nothing effeminate or hypocritically shy in exploring it. He does not sentimentalize to be cute or prudish. No doubt he idealizes it. He is the lover captive of his beloved.

What his nude is, so is his garden-sculpted creations. It’s one with his sculptor’s vision and dream. To  create more beauty out of beauty. His garden combines philosophy, beauty and art. Combines the livingness of space in harmony with Nature’s four elements. So a robust relationship interacts. He gives importance and dignity to his use of stone, rock, plant, hewn wood. Their natural shapes speak to him of balance and harmony with their surroundings. The natural shapes of the objects claim the right to their spaces which puts you in a blissful state of contemplation. Araos intuits the language of nature; he listens to the voice of the elements; he works to transmute what he hears into art.  The dialogue born becomes a statement of the grace that can only come from God. “Everything can be honed but Grace comes only from God.”  His garden is thus created,

His garden is paradisal, like his Melendrian Antipolo Garden, a reminder of how it must have been in the original paradise. Only a man in direct communion with Inang Kalikasan can create such a garden. The mandala patio in the Melendrian Garden with its equidistant columns of aged wood drawn in a circle becomes like the Druids’ altar of adoration. In the bareness of space the design is strong and made significant. The bare space of the mandala patio embraces the visitor who walks in and stands in quietude to complete a rare spiritual experience.  It is a vision of Nature’s ornaments: wood, stones and bricks, earth, grass, plants, and the wind that becomes complete in the presence of man. 

His furniture designs are sculptures in themselves. They can be utilized too. Huge pieces of hardwood carved into banquet tables and massive benches.  His 2000 centennial table without a single nail to hold the pieces together is a masterpiece of design. His Bansoy—bansot na punong kahoy—are delectable creations also. They are forests-in-miniature. They are extensions of the sculptor’s creativity in the dynamics of plant.

Araos’ creations comprise one total world of brilliant sculptures hewn from the imagination of an artist truly gifted. 

The creative man who feels becomes an artist; the creative man who thinks becomes a philosopher. The creative man who creates art drawn from his heart and mind is a genius.  Araos is an artist-philosopher.

Need further things be said?