(Cooperation) / Oil on canvas with board lining / 83 x 89 cm / Artist: Antonio Austria / Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Collection

Since the 1960s, Austria has held on to a naive style he calls “vernacular.” He paints city or country folk in their daily occupation with a cheerful, unperturbed, matter-of-fact attitude toward life. Market scenes, jeepneys, sari-sari or variety stores, and carnival shows are among the themes portrayed in his canvases. He makes it a point to simplify a scene or object to its barest structure. He further reduces the structure to flattest planes of hues or tones that strongly contrast with each other.

Bayanihan is one of Austria’s finest works that illustrates the aforementioned artistic device. What is most remarkable about this work is the sophisticated, well-thought-out composition that underlies the naive picture of a community building a house. Beams, posts, and scaffolds of the house become the picture’s design base. The monotony of the resulting irregular gridwork is broken by the figures perched on the lines. While figures of midget proportion are childlike, their stances are all so convincingly summarized in contrapuntal manner, which only a keen, mature artist can do. Note that the figures are never frontal but are viewed from varying angles: rear view, side view, top view, and bottom view. Likewise, gestures of work vary: one climbs a post, two others carry poles over their shoulders, and another is cutting wood with a saw. His contrasting colors are harmonized by accentuating large areas of a color with a patch of its complementary color. This is illustrated by the vermilion shirt at left, contrasting with the wide area of powder blue of the skyline and the thalo green of the horizon line.