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Friday, March 29, 2024

Breathing new life into decayed leaves

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By Neil  Doloricon

Can art be subjective and objective at the same time? This is really a philosophical and scientific question. For example, Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci discovered the aesthetic properties of nature which he expressed in what we now call the Fibonacci sequence: a series of numbers where the next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it. This commences from 0 and 1; the sequence goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so forth. 

The Vetruvian man of Leonardo da Vinci is a classic presentation of the links among human proportion, architecture, and symmetry which is the basic proportion of all designs. This is also true in the golden ratio, also a design proportion that can be found by dividing a line into two parts so that the longer part divided by the smaller part is also equal to the whole length divided by the longer part.

The recent thesis exhibit of Cristina Escario, MFA student from University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, entitled “Dahon Transience in Infinity,” revisited the classical and basic foundation of design. It took her a while to come up with an idea on what to propose for her thesis. While strolling in some areas of UP Diliman campus, to ponder on what concept and medium to use, she came across an enormous scattered pile of big dried leaves getting in her way, which she started to collect for four years—yes, for four years—while contemplating on what to do with them.

Escario observed and studied the leaves, trying to find their intrinsic qualities, which gave her the push to investigate further. It was as if she had discovered a gold mine in her quest for a perfect medium and concept. Her story is similar to that of a man who travels to different places in search of wonderful butterflies, only to find out that the most beautiful butterflies could be found in his own backyard.

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She did not pick the leaves from the branches of trees. They were leaves that had fallen on the ground. Storing the leaves and protecting them from decaying proved to be a tall task for Tintin. She had to use science to delay the decomposition of the leaves and to make them easier to manipulate. She applied a glycerine solution to the leaves, but eventually, nature had to take its course and the leaves decayed.

She finally used the dried leaves for what she thought to be the appropriate time—as materials for her proposed master’s thesis. The use of organic materials, according to Tintin, is a reaction to synthetic and harsh chemical based product which she used previously in her many oeuvres. The pattern she made, which was based on the golden ratio, was also metaphor for life as well as nature which has its ebb and flow and continuity, as stated by Tintin.

Cristina Escario's massive Dahon installation made of dried leaves she collected for four years

“Transience in Infinity” spoke of the relativity and universality of nature. The concept of the disintegration of leaves may relatively vary as its longevity depends on its botanical properties and environ. But there is the universality that all of those things will decompose sooner or later. 

For Tintin, it is at the stage of the aging leaf that began its engagement into the realm of aesthetics. The result of this creative process of making massive installation of leaves was astonishing, leaves reinvented. 

She likens her application of repetitive symmetry in nature to form an imagery to her spiritual journey and her transformed perception of created order. Fibonacci has a mathematical explanation of nature’s wonder in design. By way of atoning oneself with nature, it gives us the mystical sojourn of our metaphorical soul that is inscrutable. 

So there are things that can be explained and observed by science. But the aspect of metaphysical has another way of proving itself through emotions. As Indian mystic Tagore would argue with Einstein, “It is a relative world, depending for its relativity upon our consciousness.” His argument is that beauty and truth are completely dependent on the one observing them; that there is no beauty without an admirer and no truth without a believer. 

Picasso may not agree with Escario’s proposition. Picasso blurts that “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.” 

Escario wanted to share the visceral experience that one might indulge in the realm of transience and the infinite spiritual world she created out of the Fibonnaci rhythmic order of the leaves. 

For Escario, her massive installation was an engagement with her audience to awaken them into appreciating and celebrating nature’s way of creation, its transition, and the passing of precious life and time as elements of beauty, that our universe, or perhaps God, if you will, has offered.  

“Dahon Transience in Infinity” was staged from April 6 to April 24 at the Corredor Gallery, College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City. 

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