Interpreting Saguil

ONE of the side events to the Nena Saguil Retrospective at the Ateneo Gallery was an afternoon conversation with people who had known the artist and visited her in her Paris studio: Aro Soriano, Egai Fernandez, Bobbie Malay. With them I exchanged reminiscences and impressions of Saguil to supplement the artworks on the walls. While there were pertinent questions about the development of her art, her use of color and the tracing of artistic influences, someone questioned Saguil's sexuality. In the Philippines, people are expected to be married on or before their 30th birthday and then to have lots of children, so people who choose to remain single are subjected to speculation about their gender preferences. If couples don't have children after a few years, tongues wag over who is sterile and why.

There were efforts to discern Saguil's sexual preference from her early paintings. One small canvas, publicly displayed for the first time in the Retro, was pointed out to the audience. It depicts the face of a man divided in two, a la Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This was interpreted to suggest that she distrusted men. Really?

On the other hand, a short story that took her 10 years to complete was said to suggest that she had a heterosexual relationship. This presumes the story is at least autobiographical in part.

Sometimes guessing a person's sexuality is like an ink blot test: one sees what he or she wants to see, and thus the inquisitor sees more of himself than the person in question. At the risk of sounding corny perhaps, one could say Saguil was married to her art, married to the beauty of Paris.

When I asked her in 1984 why she never married, she replied: "Isn't it the dream of every artist to do what he wants? To be free? Perhaps that's why I remained single. Perhaps God wanted me to become a painter. Besides there is a moral side to it: How can I tell my husband, 'Bahala ka na sa damit mo, I have to paint'? And what about our children? One poet said that if you want to be an artist, you have to be alone. If you are alone you are one. If there are two of you, you become one-half-half of your personality is gone. What more if you are three or four? Let's not even talk of marriage, but there was a great poet from New York who said, 'Come to New York. I'll make you famous...' What kind of a proposition is that? How can you marry a man like that? Should you go with a man because he promises you something? Isn't love the attraction?"

It was suggested that this poet from New York was Jose Garcia Villa. The other suspects were a British photographer and a German critic. All the speculations made Saguil and her work more intriguing.

Worse, I realized that Saguil lied about her age, turning back the clock to make herself 10 years younger than she really was. Art history and criticism is really a different branch of the humanities but the historical method is still useful.

Looking at her paintings of meticulous circles and dots that have been described as amoeba or the cosmos surging and expanding on paper or canvas, one wonders whom we are to believe-the explanation of the artist or the art critic. For example, in the years before her death, her eyesight started to deteriorate. Her work induced headaches and her doctor prescribed eye drops that produced visions of circles and the universe. Of course, she denied that these images influenced her art.

Though her abstraction has been described as Zen-like, she says she knows very little about Zen, neither did she read anything on it. Recalling a discussion with a German critic, she described them as having the empathy of the Oriental. One critic looked at her paintings and exclaimed: "I can feel the island, I can smell the trees, kako ang ganda a!"

Speaking through an interpreter, she told to a German critic who described her work as well thought-out and mathematical: "I am not mathematical. Its feeling is not calculating, and it is spontaneous, it is feeling. I do not say I will put this circle [here] so that it will balance with that circle there. I like the Bauhaus. Very methodical, very mathematical because the German painter starts by thinking I'll put this circle here so it will balance with that circle there. Mine is feeling, spontaneous feeling. I don't think."

The critic interrupted her with the question, "You don't think?"

To which she replied, "I think afterwards. For example, if balance or movement is lacking, then I put a circle here and that is the time when I think. I think after..."

Another time, Saguil explained that, "Art is pain. It's like gold, which has to be refined. Suffering refines you and makes you better."

Having been a monk once, for five years, I now understand what she was talking about although I do not see pain in her exuberant paintings.

So many questions, very few answers. Fernando Zobel described Saguil's work as having "whoopee." To people in my generation a "whoopee cushion" produces an embarrassing fart-like sound when sat on. What exactly did Zobel mean?

What exactly do Saguil's paintings mean? She explains her work in a series of handwritten "lectures," which can either mean (in English) speeches she hoped to deliver during her retrospective or (in French) "readings."

Abstract art being open to many interpretations, one should just view the retro to form one's own conclusions.