A Strong and Unique Visual Force

To describe Veneracion’s work is to bring back the context of his early period. In the early 1970’s, or even before that an attitude that divides the whole pictorial area into several areas (or cells) as though the divisions have their own individual sovereignty as in the city states of old European maps… like there are several paintings assembled together. A tension is therefore achieved and generated as a strong and unique visual force… the colors reverberate, resound. They do not deal with transparencies or lateral movement: they provide a frenzied structure built according to intuition. The segments draw a tension of belonging, and independence, singularity and multiplicity…a whole catalogue of his seemingly endless devices and techniques may make him quite an artist with rather sophisticated hand-mind coordination, and yet, there smacks a touch of primitivism in the way the geometric shapes were intuitively laid around, and the way the colors were mis-coordinated. This works for him now, as he provides a checkpoint of what may be called “Filipino taste.”

1984 Raymundo R. Albano
Museum Director
Cultural Center of the Philippines