Romulo Olazo (1932 -2015)

Signed & Dated

signed and dated 1990 (lower right)

Medium

acrylic on paper

Measurements

24†x 34†(61 cm x 86 cm)

Provenance

Provenance: Galleria Duemila, Manila

Write Up

To this day, constant provocations of the line continue to inform the country’s foremost abstractionist Romulo Olazo’s masterpieces. His lines, heightened in its expressivity, are further showcased in his Permutation series, a cognate to his Diaphanous works, described simply by critic Cid Reyes as “the outline of the Diaphanous minus the screens.†Composed as crowding together in a chain-like progression, geometric outlines pervade his canvases, either in black-and-white compositions or set in a simulated grainy surface texture of alluring hues. Fernando Zobel, Olazo’s acknowledged major influence, used a hypodermic syringe in his groundbreaking masterpieces. Olazo also found his main instrument in a US art shop, the striper, which launched his Permutation series. It enabled the artist to produce clean and precise line traces onto the canvas. He would build up forms through linear overlapping for this series, instead of his transparent layering technique in his Diaphanous works. In the book Romulo Olazo, Reyes further expounded: “The canvas is irradiated with a spangle of lines like crackling electric wires, looping acrobatically in the still air. The result is a web of lines, a lariat thrown into a void. With graceful coherence, the lines exuberantly break into their own choreography.†This Permutation piece is an exemplification of Olazo’s genius linear overlapping characterized by clean, sharp, and well-defined lines and rendering of irregular yet highly geometric forms equating the entire pictorial design of ethereality and visual resonance.