The museum gallery of my Uncle Ramon Orlina of Taal,Batangas will open on Nov 30,Saturday,2013 in Tagaytay City.I will cover the opening ceremonies and make some write ups for Batangas newspapers. Ramon Orlina is actually a cousin of my grandma from the old Ascue clan of Balayan,Batangas,his grandmother Ana Ascue married a Taaleno and he became Taaleno as well.Ana Ascue is a sister of my great great grandmother Catalina Ascue-Ocson. Ramon Orlina is the pioneer of glass sculpting in the world. Ramon Orlina (27 January 1944) is a sculptor and an architect who created sculptural form in glass as a medium. His artworks consist of glass murals, table sculptures within an architectural setting. Arcanum XIX Paradise Regained, the glass altar and overall sculptural architectural design of the Greenbelt Chapel in Makati City are some of his achievements. He has also done public glass sculptures in Asian countries such as Fertile Crescent in Singapore and A Touch of Glass in Hongkong. Orlina also made the best entry in the 1982 AAP annual competition, an award from AAP Photography competition, and from the National Memorial of the Philippines Competition. If art is innovation, then Ramon Orlina is an artist par excellence. For decades, Orlina has been transfiguring glass into art. He was the first to carve figures out of blocks of glass using the cold method, cutting, grinding, and polishing his work with improvised tools and instruments - a feat at that time yet unreplicated even in highly industrialized countries. Such were his resource and creativity in translating industrial glass waste into prized sculpture that he amazed even the masters of glass art in Czechoslovakia. His masterpieces place him, in international appraisals of the art, among the gurus Dale Chihuly of the United States and Bertil Vallien of Sweden. That he was self-taught, with hardly any predecessor, mentor, or influence to emulate, makes his achievement all the more outstanding. His works are a marvel, and proclaim the Filipino genius to an international community. His Wings of Victory hung from the ceiling of the eight-story Wisma Atria in Singapore (until they were removed); Fertile Crescent stands at the Marina Park of the Singapore Indoor Stadium; the Quintessence, a glass window installation is the centerpiece of the Singapore Art Museum; New Horizon adorns the China Hotel in Guangzhou; and several other glass sculptures welcome visitors to the Hakataka Museum and Theater in Japan. His large-scale works in the Philippines included Oneness, an eight-meter high sculpture in glass, stainless steel, and concrete, at the Liwasang ASEAN of the CCP complex and Arcanum XIX, Paradise Gained, a giant mural measuring six feet by nine and weighing three tons, at the lobby of the Silahis International Hotel. These and countless others inspire awe and reveal the strange mixture of strength and fragility of his medium, a mixture that ultimately amounts to beauty. His smaller works are as remarkable. The Naesa series, in particular, has been hailed by critics as a masterful synthesis of his transparent and frosted glass techniques. Of this series, poet-critic Prof. Emmanuel Torres says, Masses and voids are handled with masterly control. Each monolithically carved piece strikes a happy balance between sinuous curvilinears and sharply angled diagonals which often recall the syncopations of 1920s/30s Art Deco. Dr. Rod Paras-Perez sums up Orlinas achievement thus: Above all, he gave to the idiom a new sense of fluidity. If only for his originality, his impeccable craftsmanship, and his success at bringing glass art to new heights, Orlina will be etched in the Filipino memory as a synonym for glass sculpture in the Philippines. (Excerpt from the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, Vol 4. Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines)
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 08:25:08 +0000
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