![]() Lectores de las palabras perdidas (Readers of the Lost Words) with five blindfolded priests in black, brown and white robes, noses buried in novena, catechism and prayer book, “blindly teaching the faith” detached from the suffering of flesh-and-blood indios. This organic culture is so enduring that still sustains our severely persecuted katutubo today. Their spirit is what rose in the 19th century Basi Revolt, defending ancestral right to ritual intoxication. Angels, saints, and the godhead itself become instruments of earthly power reimagined in the upside-down world of his Una iglesia antigua de Basey, Samar.įocus on the indio psyche’s derailment from its organic world also evokes contrast between indio minds still enslaved today and our long-gone, pre-colonial ancestors. Giving full play to his insights on the historical facts he unearthed, the scholarly Hofileña travels beyond history into metaphysical realms. Hocus’s bête noire is the Patronato Real that subjugated our ancestors with the Cross tightly entwined with the Sword. HO is Saul Hofileña, a lawyer-historian who dreamed up these images in the mythic spirit of 19th century painter Esteban Villanueva’s recreation of the Basi Revolt.ĬUS is Guy Custodio, a Spanish period art restoration specialist and painter who lent his fine expressionist hand to Hofileña’s sardonic retelling of the Filipino-Spanish centuries in authentic detail. "Hocus" is a portmanteau of the surnames of the two Filipinos behind these 26 oil paintings. ![]() Its leap of consciousness, to my mind, is the closest contemporary Filipino art has come to recreating the trauma of colonization thus far. ![]() There’s a sense of the fullness of time in "HOCUS," a new exhibit in the National Museum of Fine Arts. What better way to mark a turning point than with powerful art? There comes a time in the lives of men and nations when ruling ideas that no longer give life must be laid to rest for the sake of the living.
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