In Nature’s Realm II – Solo by Edwin Wilwayco

Chabot Fine Art Gallery is pleased to present internationally acclaimed Filipino-American artist Edwin Wilwayco In Nature’s Realm II. Wilwayco has been critiqued by Cid Reyes one of the top art critics of the Philippines and winner of the Art Critic of the Year Award and James T Valliere whose interviews with Jackson Pollock’s contemporaries include Willem de Kooning and critic Clement Greenberg that have appeared in many publications and are in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Museum. All of the works on display were created in Wilwayco’s studio in the Philippines.

An excerpt from the Cid Reyes review:

Arcadian Abstraction

In Landscape into Art, the author Kenneth Clark observed of the English artist Constable: And in his greatest work naturalism is raised to a higher mode by his belief that since nature was the clearest revelation of God’s will the painting of landscape, conceived in the spirit of humble truth, could be a means of conveying moral ideas.

Throughout the centuries, nature as the essence of landscape painting, has universally held artists in thrall with its mystery and magnificence, recognizing in it a primal force, indeed eliciting terror in the presence of the sublime.

Filipino-American artist Edwin Wilwayco has seized on the subject of nature, in a style aligned with the tenets and techniques of Abstract Expressionism. His mastery of the syntax of this idiom has served Wilwayco in a good stead, revitalizing his works with a liberating freshness and energy. From the conventions of the idiom, the artist wrested an unflagging and disciplined improvisatory style that has the spring and immediacy of vital hand gestures, seemingly at the behest of nature and the elements: trees, skies, clouds, pasture, foliage, leaves, tendrils, valleys, rain and wind storms, mountains and mists, rivers and streams: all the sensations of nature as could be evoked by lush, painterly brushstrokes. A kind of rhythmic organic growth then emerges from the relentless welter of wave upon wave of deeply saturated colors, charged by inventive and whimsical filigrees of lines and traces pf elegant arabesques. Wilwayco interlaces layers and layers of forms and planes, intent on excavating the inner life of nature.
Edwin Wilwayco has always been impelled to translate landscape into art- an Arcadian abstraction- regarding each painting as an expedition into the inexhaustible luxuriance of nature, irradiated by the artist’s own spiritual light.

August 27 till September 21
Opening Reception September 2 5 to 9 pm
Gallery Night Reception September 19 5 to 9 pm

Please note the gallery will be open on Monday Labor Day from Noon – 9pm with the Opening Reception beginning at 5pm

Additional works available by request: