Celebrating a career that span 43 years of poring over the world’s expensive gemstones and metals---tremendously exciting, glittering mysteries of the Earth’s crust, tremors, ambience and ages, Hans Brumann holds a unique fair of irresistible eye grabbers forged by his passion for design and sculpting at the Podium, ADB Avenue, Ortigas Center, Pasig City on December 5 to 9, 2006.

In his new show, Brumann sets the nacre or mother of pearl as the fount of his creative designs of wall and floor sculptures. Their finished art forms represent his affection for his adopted homebase, the Philippines, and its people, 50 of whom have given him their pledge of incomparable craftsmanship and loyalty. The others---the ultra rich---has undyingly sworn to the high international standards of his design and professional service. Like the mysterious orient of a natural pearl which marks this jewel as a monarch’s timeless delight, Brumann has accrued permanence in his customer’s pride and esteem since he received the mantle of expertise and trust from the La Estrella del Norte, Manila’s fabled jewelry craft maker, which imported his foreign skill and experience, and the Ding Velayo Export Corporation later.

In “A Blush of Nacre,” Brumann introduces his visitors first to his passionate outbursts for this country. The Philippines is a mass of huge skies, cloud bursts, nestles of sea foams, and broad trunks of the some of the world’s most beautiful trees. A paradise to a restless soul who watches the world with the adolescent’s wild wandering mind and an old man’s ache to set things in repose.

Brumann celebrates his impulses by different moods and turns. Employing a jigsaw fashion of interspersing the nacre with polishes wood of yellow and red narra, kamagong, and molave---the best of the Philippine hardwood---Brumann duplicates the experience of wandering inside the woods. The sheets of mother of pearl peep through the woods like the moist misty air at noontime.

These flips of imagination and emotions through the alternate layout of wood and shell nacre never digress into flamboyance or excess in their art form. Brumann justifies his wood grids as his measure to control and limit the fluorescence of the nacre’s beauty. He fuses the discipline in his jewelry craft into a balance of the warm colors of the wood and the reflective surface of shell nacre. He turns the raw knobs and half-round growths of the nacre’s plates into mysterious objects of eye perceptions.

Another wonder of Brumann’s impeccable craft is shown in his free-standing sculptures, an ode to the Philippines hardwood species. While he ripped their barks off, he reveals the vibrating lines of deepening colors against warm and bright shades. He smoothens their textures as if to say sylphs did indeed inhabit them and tree trunks were their cocoons. Brumann almost calls out not only a paean to his creations but drives the human body to slither like a snake all about the cool reflecting surface of wood.