Climbing Vines #51
"Tales of the Trellis"
Oil on Canvas,
H. 119.38 x W. 154.94 cm.

The words may not amount to much in the way of understanding Wilwayco's creative process, except the intent to create his own personal hallmark. But the quality of the repros is clear enough (though some may need a magnifying glass) to give readers an idea of his modus operandi of nearly a quarter of century. As your eye leapfrogs from one repro to another, the imagery undergoes appreciable changes: from the early post student attempts at pure abstraction (1976) to the Philippine flag series (1977) to the bleak clothes-hanger symbols of his year as a British Council scholar (1982) to his popular jeepney fantasies (1985-87) to the bird-of-paradise series painted on floor-standing shojis on wheels and wallworks of irregularly shaped panels (1992-94) to the vine series begun last year. You can definitely trace a linear continuity at least from the forms of the '80s to the present.

Climbing Vines #55
"Object of Affection"
Oil on Canvas, H. 91.44 x W. 99 cm.

Whether he has effectively steered clear of formulaic repetition is arguable. Since he got enamored of garden plants as the motif of his art-making, his art has inclined toward effusive effects, substituting prolixity of shapes, lines and textured strokes for cogency of focus - "loading every rift with ore", as it were. What empty spaces he provides his image-clusters to "breathe in" are confined, minimally, at the corners or a side of the canvas. Quite evident is the Pinoy Baroque propensity for filling up every void in his pictures, which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't make them look overworked, as they do in the two largest in his forthcoming show of only seven works.

Climbing Vines #58
"Dreaming of Heights"
Oil on Canvas, H. 76.20 x W. 76.20 cm.

A justification for the pictorial overload in his Vines Series II is the subject-matter itself from which he has abstracted luscious shapes and sinuous lines: the dense botanical forms which climb on walls, trellises and lattices in the garden grounds of his BF house and studio, which he points out to visitors asking for his inspirational sources these days. "Especially", he adds, "when they are blowing in the wind."

A familiar Wilwayco characteristics is the restless movement in the new series. But what semblance the latest works bear to real vines is generic rather than specific. They are not even painted green but in blue and orange/buff monochromes, and the forms look more like windblown flames than stems, leaves, tendrils, flowers.

The overload is not eased by thickening the pigment in certain areas of the two largest canvases, one such being "Climbing Vines" No. 52 (Late Nights on a Lattice)." There's a literal semblance to a vine in long gobs of pigment squeezed straight from the tube onto certain portions of the painting virtually leap out of the canvas, just as there's an impression of a lattice evoked by raking strokes over impasto passages.

Climbing Vines #57 "Soulful Climb"
Oil on Canvas, H. 61.00 x W. 91.44 cm.

No doubt the artist wants his new pieces to look precisely the way they do, without a center to pull his flamboyant shapes together. Clearly, they are an extension of the same subject-matter at last year's Lopez Museum show, except that those were much smaller works, 30 of them - pang-tiyange (for the market), as Wilwayco jokingly puts it. Vines Series II are more exciting and complicated. As in some Impressionist paintings (Claude Monet comes to mind) emphasis is distributed evenly all over the canvas-surface, not on a single climactic point but on several. At least the blue-orange monochromes see to it that the overall composition doesn't hang so loosely that the result is helter-skelter. Wilwayco is too intelligent a craftsman to allow that to happen.

Though the latest Vines are meant to be non-figurative, the eye looking for a point of respite amid Wilwayco's flaming restiveness, can see, or conjure up, sections of human anatomy. Because his abstract shapes are not flat planes but rendered with "shading", even slightly modeled, to suggest volume, it isn't surprising to see a reniform leaf assume the shape of a buttock or female genital.

In sum, not an impressionistic effect is captured in Wilwayco's new canvases, but a dense, visceral sensation, like aerial or intestinal turbulence. One misses the strongly characterized abstract articulations of his jeepneys and inspired innovations of his screens. It is time, to quote from his own Artist's Statement , to push himself "over the edge" and produce a "tension" more absorbing than that of the vines he has clung to long enough.

Photos courtesy of GALERIA DUEMILA