Carnival Forms
signed (lower right) dated 1993
acrylic on handmade paper
36” x 48” (91 cm x 122 cm)

Provenance:
Acquired directly from the artist in 1993

In some abstract works, enough of a likeness has been retained to represent real things. In others, original objects have been reduced to simple geometric shapes and they can be barely identified unless the artist has named them his title — his concern being the rendering of the essence of the subject rather than the natural form itself. Arturo Luz’ painting entitled Carnival Forms (1958) suggests the fun and gaiety of the carnival through the varying repetition of the wheel form.

Arturo Luz has produced art pieces through a disciplined economy of means. His early drawings were described as "playful linear works" influenced by the likes of Paul Klee. Since then, Arturo Luz has devoted his sixty year career to a highly stylized version of minimal austerity.

Arturo Luz, like Fernando Zobel, Constancio Bernardo, Lee Aguinaldo and Jose Joya are among the artists who explored non-objective art in painting and mixed media works, both in linear and painterly styles. But Luz, through discipline, has built his reputation around distinct visual worlds stripped of distraction and sentiment. His direction had to do with abstract painting of a geometric-planar kind.

They are deceptively simple, and represent the artist’s never ending search for the essential characteristics of subject through a reduction of form and selective use of color. His best masterpieces are minimalist, geometric abstracts, alluding to themodernist "virtues" of competence, order and elegance; yet amid all the descriptions, the core basis of his art is drawing.

After his early figurative works featuring bottles, musicians, cyclists and jugglers, his paintings underwent a rigorous abstractioning process to the point of geometricism.

A founding member of the modern Neo-realist school in Philippine art, Arturo Luz received the National Artist Award, the country's highest accolade in the arts, in 1997.