Filipino artist Luis Lorenzana is a self-taught artist whose primary schooling in Public Administration and a formative career working at the Philippine Senate has provided his early work with a distinct political awareness. He uses our dark past—colored by internecine conflict—as well as our surreal political present to make twisted brutally incisive commentaries on the state of our country today.
Lorenzana recently discovered a large body of early works created around 2005 to 2008 hidden in his studio. The entire collection remained intact. Previously in his career, these works were deemed to have no commercial market. After stumbling upon his old works, Lorenzana shares that he did not have a clue on what would happen to the pieces after rediscovering them after so many years.
The pieces were shown to an international collector with a strong interest in promoting art from the Philippines to an international audience. This collector has a reputation for acquiring, archiving and exhibiting historically important bodies of work in collaboration with the world’s leading museums. When the collector first saw Lorenzana’s early work, he was shocked and emotionally overwhelmed. He had never seen such a fresh, powerfully raw and emotional display of art from one artist.
The paintings, which reminded the collector of works by Yoshitomo Nara and Jean-Michel Basquiat, resonate not only to the Philippines, but also to the rest of the world. Over the course of many months, this collector made the decision to acquire the entire body of work, referring to it as the Luis Lorenzana Archival Collection. This acquisition is important because rather than having the works dismantled and dispersed among various collectors, making it almost impossible to organize for a coherent exhibition, they remain together and therefore may be researched, viewed, and interpreted as a comprehensive whole.
The collection has attracted international attention by curators and art world professionals for its fresh aesthetic, witty social commentary, and its relationship to popular culture and timely political issues.
This month, an exhibition and book on this archival collection was launched. The idea of people seeing these works for the first time becomes a channel for Lorenzana to communicate to spectators on how he started as an artist. It demonstrates his visions and voices then that were never seen nor heard. Lorenzana deems these an eye-opener and reference point from where he began, and the direction he is heading as an artist.
Entitled Lorenzana Archival Collection, the publication includes critical essays by Michelle Yun, senior curator of Modern and Contemporary art at Asia Society, New York and Ryu Niimi, director of the Oita Prefectural Art Museum, Japan, and one of that country’s leading curators of international contemporary art. Fukuoka-Prize winner Ambeth R. Ocampo added historical context to the collection’s anchor works that feature Filipino heroes; with a biographical essay by Lisa Guerrero Nakpil. The book is published by International Arts and Artists, a leading non-profit art touring organization in Washington, DC. Its founder and president, David Furchgott, was in Manila for the occasion as well as Michelle Yun, the book’s author. The book will be exclusively sold at Leon Gallery or online at Artbooks.ph.
The execution of the exhibition is carefully and artistically well planned. It has always been the practice of Lorenzana to use ornate frames that will complement his artwork. The presentation will be a visual feast as Lorenzana modifies and paints on the frames as well.
The works are an astonishing record of one Filipino artist’s process and development as well as a colorful record of our own country’s current events that mirror the entire world’s goings-on’s in more ways than one.