'Filipiniana Compsition II '

"Light illuminates everything in a dramatic fashion,” begins Edgardo Lantin, a Vancouver-based Filipino artist who is currently in the Philippines for his major exhibit opening today at the SM Art Center in SM Megamall. Titled Inner Light, the exhibit, organized by Finale Art Gallery, showcases snapshots of Filipiniana scenery (falling under the category called “genre painting”) and portraits that are bathed in finely calibrated gradations of light which render a face, a body, or the natural world a mellowness and subtlety, as though viewed through the screen of nostalgia.

His gardens, where maidens exchange small talk or where children watch an elder painting on a canvas mounted on an easel, are spectacular in their life-like quality. The details, for sure, are thoroughly articulated (the mess of foliage for instance) but what gives them their splendor is how the light seems to fall in patches and patterns, evoking the possible effects of an invisible cloud formation or other elements that are not contained by the frame. This interplay of light and shade is reminiscent of the idyllic landscapes of Fernando Amorsolo. Lantin can’t emphasize enough what light contributes to a work of art. “When light hits the form, it dramatizes the pictorial image, he says. “That is what gives life to the painting and which us painters constantly look for.”

Lantin, it seems, also looks for the ways with which his figures--usually in a countryside setting and garbed in traditional outfits--come alive in the paintings. To have vibrant scenery is one thing but to have people in one’s work look as though they really exist in real life is another. For this, Lantin devoted a year studying anatomy and the sculptural properties of a body when he was a student at the Art Students League of New York. The painter wanted to know not only the surface of the body but the musculature beneath it. Form, for Lantin, is supported by its underlying structure. Studying in New York was his way of getting into the heart of the matter.

Painting the figures with an overt claim to an identity--unmistakably Filipino, specifically in the turn of the 20th century--seems that the artist is merely indulging in nativist sentiment. The clothes are outdated and when viewed from the vantage point of the Philippines in the 21st century, his models seem to be merely play-acting. Women in fields and orchards today don’t wear baro’t saya. But for the artist, who grew up in the bucolic setting of Lipa, Batangas, painting the figures as such is a way of reconnecting with his roots--a constant reminder of his identity even if he has called Vancouver as home for more than three decades. People, including those he has left behind, fascinate him. “I really have a sincere touch with people,” he says. “I love painting people.”

This love for people is evident when the landscape plays second fodder to the figures who inhabit his paintings. His masterful stroke of highlighting aspects of the scenery draws the viewer to a focal point which is usually the model’s face. As though lit with an inner glow, hence the title, Lantin’s models seem to be infused with attitudes and moods, a certain biographical aliveness. Lantin’s talent is deeply rooted in classical portraiture but is burnished with a particular modern expressiveness.

Inner Light runs until March 1.