The Patchwork configurations in the paintings of Roy Veneracion (b. 1947) signaled an exciting direction in Philippine abstraction. His works, with their tattered and seemingly clumsy abstract patterns, are an aesthetic criticism of the cosmetic refinement that soon characterized the smooth and immaculately crafted minimalist Philippine paintings. Veneracion’s intentional shabbiness of texture and his exaltation of trashy and scratched surface force on the viewer a recognition of the pai...

 by REUBEN RAMAS CANETE Roy Veneracion has always thought out of the box. The UP Diliman Fine Arts alumnus has, since the Seventies, forged a path of aesthetic difference by combining motifs and concepts together from far-flung sources: Western Modernist Abstraction and Asian philosophical concepts, begun in the early Seventies; segueing to Postmodern montage and neo-Expressionism in the Eighties; and settling down since the Nineties into a fusion of disparate forms, primarily drawn and painte...

Jose Rizal was a19th Century Syncretist. Juan Luna was a Romantic. Rizal was a Romantico-Realis ta. Velasquez mated with the anonymous primitive that produced Picasso, the 20th Century Syncretist.   ...