Renato Habulan and Papelismo

 

Essay 20. RENATO HABULAN AND PAPELISMO

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

Last February 28, the biggest in the series of exhibitions to assert the significance of paper in artmaking opened at the Estancia Mall. Titled PAPELISMO BOCETO, the show, which was presented by Eskinita Art Gallery and part of the Ortigas Art Festival 2020, featured around 300 bocetos or studies for bigger works by 100 artists.

RENATO HABULAN, the driving force behind Papelismo, invited me in late 2011 to join an art exhibit devoted solely to works on paper. This exhibit was Habulan's way of disabusing the art-loving public of the notion that works on paper are inferior to oil and acrylic paintings on canvas.

The exhibit, titled PAPELISMO, opened on September 4, 2012 at the Crucible Gallery. It was the first in what would turn out to be a series of exhibits. Participating in that initial show aside from Habulan, were Alfredo Liongoren, Benjamin Torrado Cabrera, Pinggot Zulueta, and myself. The show gained much media attention: announcements and reviews  of the show appeared in the Philippine Star, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Manila Bulletin.

Renato Habulan was a founding member of Kaisahan---the brave group of Social-Realist painters that gained renown during the Martial Law years. A Thirteen Artists awardee, Habulan has had several solo exhibitions to his name.

His solo show at the Hiraya Gallery in the early 1980s, where he displayed his signature work "Kagampan" was notable. It was a critical and commercial success, and earned him his niche as one of the stalwarts of the Social Realist Movement in the Philippines. Gathered in that show were Habulan's now iconic images of farm workers, industrial laborers with their machines or tools of production, and people who earned their living on the streets, like the itinerant peddlers.

I was at the opening of that solo show of Habulan in 1982, if I remember the year correctly. "Kagampan", a massive oil on canvas work was easily the piece de resistance of that show. Measuring 5 X 8 feet, the monumental painting, which is a "group portrait" of farmers and maybe even urban workers, depicts them in a setting overpowered by a fiery sky heralding the onset of sunset. Sunset here could be a visual metaphor for the waning or end days of the class seen as the oppressor of workers. But then, another interpretation, the opposite one, could also be true. Kagampan could be Habulan's very own revelation, his apocalypse, of the sorry plight of the working class who could be engulfed sooner or later, after an upheaval, by the shadows of their eternal night.

There is a third possible interpretation of the painting though, the one most plausible, which could be gleaned from the title of the painting itself. Kagampan is the Filipino word for the woman's last month of pregnancy. Thus, conception, gestation, and birth are the keywords here, the clues to the painting's exact meaning. If that is so, Habulan perhaps was anticipating the impending birth of a genuine new society, where the opportunities for economic advancement are available to all, which is a negation of the so-called New Society imposed by a dictator which was bastardized by brutality and mega-thievery.

Habulan had exhibited extensively abroad, including Singapore, where he exhibited mixed-media assemblages, among others, that revealed his long-time fascination with the material manifestation of folk beliefs and religion hereabouts.The title of that show---which was actually a collaborative exhibit with Alfredo Esquillo---was "Semblance/Presence".

This series of Papelismo exhibits shows Habulan's single-minded approach in promoting whatever his advocacy is at the moment. That is integrity. And that, coupled with his prodigious talent, are the reasons for his status as a most-sought artist here and in Singapore. Habulan hopes that Papelismo will be a "continuing saga", a long-lived movement that will absorb into its fold more and more artists who will no longer relegate their works on paper to second-class status.