Editors’ Note: Kamarin Art Gallery in Naga City features the works of Gus Albor in an exhibit entitled “Origins” starting on February 4, 2023. A first for Kamarin, this major exhibit marks the celebration of National Arts Month.
To appreciate the works of Augusto “Gus” Albor, one simply needs to turn to his peers in the art community. The late Raymundo Albano, curator of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, characterized Albor’s early works as articulating a surface of great attentiveness, while his current works as directed towards the metaphysical. According to multi-media artist Cesare Syjuco, his influence is immeasurable. Artist and writer Cyd Reyes describes Albor as the Filipino abstractionist supreme. National artist Arturo Luz completes the acclaim with a succinct statement, “Augusto Albor is quite simply the best that the Philippines has to offer.”
Albor’s father was a farmer, miner and carpenter. His family moved to several places in Sorsogon and Camarines Sur looking for better job opportunities.
As a young man, his natural and prodigious skills in art took him to the University of the East School of Music and Fine Arts; to his first show at Galerie Bleu in Rustan’s Department Store in 1974; to a thriving career as one of the country’s foremost abstractionists since the ‘70s. He was supported by a grant from the British Council to study at the West Surrey College of Fine Art. He was a Thirteen Artists Awardee from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His works have been shown in exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Japan, France, and the United States, to name a few.
As a painter and sculptor known for his minimalist abstraction works, his art is partial towards minimal color registers, treated with extreme subtlety, soft transitions, and muted harmonies. Cyd Reyes expounds, “No other Filipino artist has laid such proprietorial domain over one particular color. Albor and his abiding preference for the color gray are synonymous; gray, in its varying tones, can express, for this artist, the inexpressible. To its absolute limit, Albor can invest gray with an aura bestowed to any other color. Gray is the color of intellect, exuding such qualities as refinement, dignity, understatement, elegance, restraint, authority.”
Artist and critic Igan D’Bayan writes in his Artmaggedon column, “Albor creates his abstracts with layers upon layers, via overlays and underlays, pouring color over color. Not a lot of people know this, but to achieve that level of Zen-like level of minimalism in one’s work, a maximalist work ethos is required. The entire process… is a long and exploratory trip. Call it a distillation: a process of sifting out, covering up and washing away what is unnecessary, distracting and superfluous.”
While many abstract artists may profess that they are creating artworks as objects, Albor regards his paintings as emanations of his conviction and concepts, indeed an exposition of his existence. Thus, Igan D’Bayan writes about Albor’s aesthetics, philosophy and politics as intruding into his works. “Territory,” his Ayala Museum show in 2019, dealt with disputes over the Spratly Islands and other tangential concerns, such as the Napoles scandal, climate change, oil spills and rice shortage. Cyd Reyes describes Albor’s later works exhibited in 2021 titled “Era” as restoring “a sense of order and calm into our troubled and distressed psyches, now reeling from the senseless deaths from a dreaded and evil virus.”
Cyd Reyes who authored Albor’s coffee table book “Immaterial” writes, “He has set for himself the insanely ambitious task of translating physics into painting. Indeed, it is a view into the seeming invisible. Abstraction, after all, is a language of the spirit…” He continues, “Over four decades of artmaking with a body of works imbued with a sustained quiet energy that is at once calming and invigorating… integrating the wonders of pictorial space that opens up to all…possibilities that have no need for the armature of form and color.”
Selected works
