(Musings) / 1971 / Oil on plywood / 91.3 x 122 cm / Artist: Alfredo Liongoren / Cultural Center of the Philippines collection

To Liongoren, abstract art is not art for art’s sake but an artist’s exposition of a universal truth: the philosophical conflict between positive and negative, between life and death, between black and white. Says Liongoren: “Abstract art is the best medium for communicating religious experience … and the depth of a limited color spectrum expresses this more eloquently.”

Pagdidili-dili is a fourfold abstraction of the omnipresence of paradox through the black, bold brushes slashing through the stillness of the somber blue-gray, and the impastoes of white emerging from gestural blobs of black. A truly meditative piece, this abstract expressionist work manifests the dynamism of conflict. Violent movement is a physical presence in the canvas.

This work, which won the first prize in the 1971 competition of the Art Association of the Philippines, became controversial because most people could not relate it to the competition’s theme, which was the 400 years of the City of Manila. The judges defended the piece as an artist’s spiritual interpretation of imagined life in Manila when its estuaries were still navigable. Liongoren has always drawn reflective inspirations from the sea. He has used the sea as a visual source rather than as a literal image.