Art at THE PODIUM

Commissioned for the Leandro Locsin-designed Benguet Center building, this geometric metal sculpture, entitled ‘Cubi’ by Arturo Luz (1926 -2021) originally stood on the small lawn fronting the original building’s entrance. ‘Cubi’, one of the few public sculptures in the Ortigas district, was produced in the 1980s and is one of Luz’s various public sculptures scattered throughout Metro Manila.

Now gracing the driveway of The Podium’s West Tower, ‘Cubi’ is one of Luz’s unique sculptures, not only due to its size, but also its perceived density. A large cubic structure balancing steadily on one of its corners, the sculpture’s apparent solidity is given some lightness and much grace due to its bisected sides. This method is in keeping with the artist’s sculptural system of interlocking planes and solids. Luz’s modernism was undergirded by the local internationalism which was borne of the 60s, and his practice of abstraction, determined by the distillation of form and figure into the recognisable surfaces of geometry.

The frothing mouth of a dying Japanese soldier, clouds during tropical sunsets in Manila, the bubbling guinataan of his mother’s cooking, a visit to a brewery in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the skyline of New York are images which the artist relates to the creation of his work ‘Cloud Canyons’. First made in 1961 as ‘Cloud Canyons: An Ensemble of Bubble Machines  (Auto-Creative Sculptures)’, and initially exhibited in 1964 at the Signals Gallery in London, the present work is this evanescent sculpture’s thirty-first version.

The ‘Cloud Canyons’ (an early name for the bubble machines; later iterations would produce the ‘Cloud Gates’, for example, in 1994) is one of David Medalla’s seminal artworks. The work, according to Medalla, was an attempt “to give tangible form to invisible forces… find a model that would show the transformation of matter into energy.”  A kinetic sculpture that works using air compressors to propel a solution of soap and water through large Perspex tubes, it produces any number of soapy clouds and towers of burbling effervesce. This admixture of bubbles and foam presents us with a sculptural form that rises to great heights and then bends, breaks, slides down, and eventually, disappears. Each time the bubbles are set in motion what slowly emerges from the tubes are any number of shapes, always unknown, always new. The ‘Cloud Canyons’ is a sculpture that continually ‘re-creates’ (or auto-creates) itself. Writer Guy Brett wrote that these sculptural works show how form can be monumental, while at the same time, fleeting and imperceptible.

Sculptor Michelle Lopez’s ‘Chandelier II’ (2020), as seen from across the main lobby, is a delicate trace of light, gracefully held within the languid line of the glass sculpture that encases it.

A sculptor deeply interested in material and their properties, Lopez often aligns form with the history of her chosen material; for this commission, she works with hand-pulled glass, that is, molten glass shaped by the artist as it cools. The work’s final shape is determined by the bodies of the artist and her fabricators as they articulate the large-scale glass sculpture with their breath and gesture.

Lopez researched the history of chandeliers and how glass and light could register movement of the body at such a large scale. There are then several registers of “the figure” to be found in these suspended forms.  ‘Chandelier II’ is a trace of the artist’s movement as each segment of glass is blown, then pulled, to create the form of an uninterrupted stroke.  It outlines, not a shape, but intimates the action of the artist’s process of production. In this work she combines a grand gesture into a sensitive, dynamic, continuous line.

Lopez is also known for her manipulation of minimal, abstract forms that hint at societal collapse and human vulnerability. Her interests, too, are found in the application and materiality of industrial materials—in this case, ropes and their utility. She writes, “The idea for this work began with my interest in rope(s) and its industrial applications to rig, hang, pull—some of these refer to a kind of historic violence. The rope becomes a stand-in for a figure—an absent or implied body.” ‘Chandelier II,‘ can then be read as a fragile rope of glass and light, drawn through the ceiling, and dropping down to drape the space below with its crystalline shimmer of an unspoken violence.