Passion for Quaintness

Essay 6. PASSION FOR QUAINTNESS

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

DANNY PANGAN belongs to that breed of Filipino painters who put a premium on nostalgia. The former director of the University of the East School of Music and Fine Arts, the late Florencio Concepcion, was the first to point this out when he labeled Danny Pangan's paintings as nostalgic realist.

Bencab's series on turn-of-the-century Filipinas in baro't saya, Isagani Fuentes' paintings of pre-Spanish jars and artifacts, and Dominic Rubio's charming old Binondo denizens with stick necks are prime examples of nostalgic art, that people today, the netizens particularly, would probably call throwback art. 

The surrealists' esoteric themes that delve into the workings of the subconscious and even of the occult are not for Pangan: nor is the pop artists' concern with contemporary icons and images. It is the past that Pangan wants to dissect.

In the nineteen-seventies, Lino Severino came out with his vanishing scene series, a masterly near-abstract depictions of Spanish era houses on their way to 'extinction'. Although Severino was not the first to use facades of old houses as subject matter in painting---but Elias Laxa who was active in the fifties---still his suite of old houses was groundbreaking. It spawned a host of imitators who specialized in doing paintings of 'bahay na bato'. Their paintings, although also masterly done, were just a rehash of the vanishing scene paintings of the master Severino. 

It was Danny Pangan who did innovate, when he incorporated in his paintings wood reliefs that make art historians hesitate on how to categorize his artworks. Pangan's pieces straddle the divide separating painting from relief sculpture. Not only that, his works can also be said to be participatory because the viewers are put into the role of visitors in a bahay na bato looking out the window and seeing outside an old house or a church. That is a witty device, and original too, as far as I know.  

Sure, there were window paintings in the past, but they are just that, paintings. Pangan's pieces, on the other hand, are like an architect's or interior designer's 3-D mock-up. His interior scenes have windows that are almost 'life-like', so to speak,  complete with wooden sills. jambs, and carved-wood head adornments.

But a shift seems to have occurred. Pangan now includes human figures in his relief works as can be seen in a piece titled "Botong's Two Assistants". This piece looks like a homenaje ---a tribute or homage---to painting masters he looks up to, like Botong Francisco, Tam Austria, and Al Perez. Botong's Two Assistants also differ in another way from Pangan's previous artworks because what can be seen outside the window is no longer an old structure, but a depiction of the age-old Filipino tradition called 'bayanihan'.  That bayanihan image is a collage. It is the large-scale painting by Botong Francisco used as cover art for a coffee-table  book. The image was printed on canvas using an inkjet printer, and glued within the window frame.

This shift is worth noting, because it points to us the path that Pangan may traverse in the development of his iconography. His interior scenes, now peopled, remain. Perhaps, what we'll see outside the windows of Pangan's future works are genre scenes of people of long ago doing their cyclical routines like planting rice, cockfighting, and buying and selling at the market.

Pangan was born in Lapaz, Tarlac, and lived for several years in Tondo, Manila, where he finished elementary and high school, before finally settling in Malolos, Bulacan. I have not seen much of Malolos as of yet, although I went there on bike twice to see the Barasoain Church and its old convento. Malolos is now a city, but I presume that it has not yet lost its quaintness. 

But it was in the equally quaint Intramuros that Pangan's artistic epiphany serendipitously occurred. Pangan related to me that he got the idea of doing window paintings when he was once inside the Rizal Shrine in Fort Santiago, and saw outside the window the bell tower of the Manila Cathedral. That was in 1978, and the first window paintings he came up with at the time were without the carved wooden reliefs that he'll be known for later on. It was only in 1984, during the Fourth Asean Art Festival in Manila, that he first exhibited, at the Rear Room Gallery, the first in his series of 3D paintings.

Pangan was a Fine Arts graduate from the University of the East, where he majored in Advertising. His first job after graduation was as art instructor at Bulacan State University's Institute of Architecture and Fine Arts. He later on worked in advertising agencies in Dubai, Jeddah, and Kuwait as senior visualizer and art director. Pangan has had ten solo shows both here and abroad. He had exhibited several times in the United States, Hongkong, Indonesia, and the Middle East. 

Pangan had won a slew of awards here, the latest and most prestigious of which is the Gawad Bayani at Bituin para sa Sining Biswal (Hero and Star Award for the Visual Arts) awarded him by the City of Malolos. Of the awards, honors, and distinction that he'd received, which included a Saudia travel grant and major prizes in two Hispanic Week painting competitions among others, I'm sure that Pangan cherish the most this one given him by Malolos. Malolos is the 'city of his affections'. Its quaint ambience is the impetus that prod him to continue making the art he does, which is a looking back with nostalgic longing to what some say was a more genteel era.

---2015