Edwin Wilwayco is a painter who made non-objective art before latching on to his now-familiar exuberant, fragmentary style. His development of three decades has a logical consistency and staying power: the Philipine Flag" series of the 70's, the widely acclaimed "Jeepney Fantasies" of the 80's and the "Bird of Paradise" of the 90's. His works are characterized by a baroque sense of movement, spaces crowded with sensuous details, and a more is better aesthetic so characteristic of Philippine decorative sense. We present here a review of Emmanuel Torres wrtten for The Philippine Star

WILWAYCO'S VINES FILL THE VOID ANEW

Climbing Vines # 53
"The Painter's Garden"
Oil on Canvas, H 101.60 x W. 132.08 cm.

Painters in mid-career like Edwin Wilwayco (b.1952) are often faced with two options: stay with a mode of art-making that proved to be an estimable and commercial success in earlier gallery outings, or move on to innovative ways of doing things to satisfy an inner urge. If the former, he runs the risk reducing his art to formulaic repetition. If the latter, he courts the possibility of alienating his fans who are likely to mistake his departure from his usual methods for the work of another. Wilwayco opts for the more sensible course: develop further, and refine aspects of his previous output so that gallery goers can follow the artist's progress from A to B to C and say, "Ah, yes, this I've seen before but now reappears in a new guise."

Wilwayco would not be the top gun he is in advertising circles today - by now, the number of painters since HR Ocampo, Vicente Manansala and J. Elizalde Navarro became art directors of ad agencies in the 1950s/'60s must surely be legion-if he didn't know how to "package" his own career as a painter. For his ninth solo exhibition (Galleria Duemila, Nov. 3-17), he has published a fairly oversize invitation which also profers a bird's-eye view of his painterly development from 1976 to 1999 with mini reproductions.

Climbing Vines # 56 "Risque"
Oil on Canvas,
H. 101.60 x W. 132.08 cm.

Climbing Vines # 52
"Late Nights on Lattice"
Oil on Canvas,
H. 109.22 x W. 149.86 cm.

Those mini-repros are ingeniously interspersed in between the words of his "Artist's Statement," set in catchy typography, which reads: "Painting is discovery. Everytime you make a mark on canvas, all sorts of problems to which you have to find solutions. When you take a brush to canvas, you never know exactly the result paint is going to make. The tension of always trying to push yourself over the edge, of testing the limits of you imagination, in the hope of creating impressions distinctly your own and quite beyond anything you ever expected when you started out ..."