Fernando Zobel

Important Private American Collection

The work is in good condition overall, as is the canvas, which is clear and taut. Impastos are healthy and intact. Examination under ultraviolet light shows minor re-touching in the background surrounding the composition, along with a repair of the canvas on the bottom right corner. Framed.
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Well versed in abstraction, and celebrated for his appropriation of this Western art genre, Fernando Zobel has achieved much acclaim for his paintings that blend minimalism and colour theory into masterful compositions that inspire the emotions of his audience. Untitled (#249) is a special piece from his oeuvre, for it marks a period of transition that showed the Filipino artist deviating away from the figurative pieces that coloured his early career as a painter.

Within the landscape of the present piece, Zobel is seen experimenting with foreign techniques and motifs. Notably what would become his signature practice of painting: the use of a glass hypodermic syringe, filled with oil paint, to execute precise lines in the narratives. This serendipitous method of painting subsequently redefined, and redirected, the artist’s works from the late fifties and onwards.

Untitled (#249) is part of Zobel’s Saeta series, a collection of abstract paintings begun in 1958, and were initially inspired by the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, whom the artist wrote a dissertation on during his time at Havard University. As well as a type of song, the word Saeta translates to mean an “arrow or dart”. As penned by the Spanish poet in Poem of the Saeta, it is revered as “Candle, lamp/Lantern and firefly/The constellation of the dart/Little window of gold/Trembling/And cross upon cross/Rocking in the dawn”¹. Another individual whose prose inspired Zobel's oeuvre was the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. His verse "I brought to Art desires and sensations:/Things half-glimpsed/Faces or lines, certain indistinct memories"², brings new meaning to the artist's pursuit of creative expression.

As much as an artist as he was an intellectual, Zobel was a true student throughout his lifetime. Much of the forties and fifties were spent in America, with the artist familiarizing himself with Western painters and their particular art movements. There were many American painters whom Zobel admired, with key individuals including Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Mark Rothko would also come to play a large role in Zobel's relationship with colour. The Saeta series and the Series Negra were in a sense Zobel's homage to Rothko, with the later works seen as a full surrendering to abstraction.

Together with an interest in abstract art, he also studied Chinese and Japanese calligraphy for they touched upon his fascination with the concept of “negative” space as being a vital part of the composition. An important influence on the artist’s understanding of classical Chinese aesthetics was Chen Bing Sun who was Zobel’s Chinese calligraphy professor.  Untitled (#249) alludes to the imagery in Zheng Xie’s set of four hanging scrolls entitled Misty Bamboo on a Distant Mountain for the present painting’s composition parallels that of the plants’ natural formation.

Though enigmatic in placement, the Saeta series were inspired by the artist's travels in the Philippines and Spain, now only memories in the dream-like paintings. “The theme [of my paintings is] movement,” the artist said. “Expressed metaphorically by the use of line. The movement of leaves, of trees, of people; movement observed, felt, never imitated but, I hope, translated”³.

It can be said that by making figures void, and embracing the animated spirit of his subjects, is what established the Saeta series as a hallmark of Zobel’s oeuvre. Untitled (#249) perfectly exemplifies this dichotomy of motion and space set into a specific paradigm: "An ethereal luminosity suffuses the [paintings], dissolving all tensions of form and constrasts of tones into an inner glow. Restrained yet deeply evocative, it gives the feeling of containing some burning truth, as if it [represented] the embodiment of long and arduous medition"^4.

¹. Frederico Garcia Lorca, The Selected Poems of Frederico Garcia Lorca, New Directions Books, New York, 2005, p. 19.

². C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992.

³. www.fernandozobel.com

⁴.  Constantino C. Tejero, Exhibit to uncover the mystique of Fernando Zobel, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Monday, June 23, 2014.