Bliss from Bygone Days

Bliss from Bygone Days

Fernando Modesto

The latest exhibition of Filipino artist Fernando Modesto (b.1952) features a collection of paintings that seem to be overflowing with euphoria, delight and rapture. The effervescent feeling is on full display in his paintings “Stravinsky’s Angels” with a group of faceless and wingless creatures with arms out-stretched and ready to take flight. Paris, his angel-character named after the city of lights, makes an appearance in this show with Modesto’s painting entitled “I Love you Paris” with masks and faces in bright colors floating in a background of dappled yellow, blue, red dots and dashes.

Art critic and book author Cid Reyes says, “Modesto’s angel de la guardia is a representation of something deeply Filipino. In terms of craftsmanship, these angels seem to have been delineated in an almost carefree manner, affecting the style of an artistic child prodigy, an “old soul.” They have become even more ethereal, in that the artist has chosen to depict them in such bare, spare strokes, spending more attention on the painterly field of pigmented, impressionistic dabs and smears, as if playing with the various chromatic chords of colors and hues. Modesto possesses a rich palette of colors favoring milky pastel shades, where the strong primary colors, red, blue and green, have been desaturated, washed out with lashings of whites.”

Fernando Modesto spent his formative years at the College of Fine Arts in the University of Sto. Tomas and went on further studies at St. Martin’s School of Art and Design in London on a scholarship grant by the British Council. His works have been exhibited extensively internationally since the 1970s.