BY CHRYSEE G. SAMILLANO
A retired art professor of La Consolacion College and a former Visayan DAILY STAR cartoonist is holding a four-month solo exhibition featuring scenes of Negros from the past and present at The Negros Museum that will run from October 16 to January 2023.
The show is the 70th birthday exhibition and the fourth solo art exhibit of renowned social realist senior visual artist and art professor Rosendo “Roy” Aguilar.
The exhibition’s theme – in retrospect of his successful first solo show in the 80’s titled “Vista Negrense” is an extension of Aguilar’s masterful execution and retelling of Negrense history and culture in a visual narrative.
The exhibit provides audiences a rich visual history of Negros and essentially, the Negrenses, through the lens of a Negrosanon artist from the margins. Aguilar is bound to his mission as an artist-educator to showcase Negros in its most sublime beauty and reality.
Aguilar said the show includes his recent paintings of scenes like The Ruins, Balay Negrense and other monuments and cultural heritage sites aside from old works he did in 1983 and MassKara Festival posters he laid out and designed.
To draw awareness, he also painted the four iconic sculptures above the Provincial Capitol building done by national artist Guillermo Tolentino which represents the four pillars of Negros Occidental – the fisherfolk, sacadas or farmworkers, horticulturist and peasants, he said.
Aguilar said his mural of a sleeping child titled “Relocation” using charcoal and linseed oil was his entry to the Philip Morris art competition.
His most notable work is “Ang Babaylan” currently housed in the Pre-Colonial Hall of The Negros Museum as one of its main collections.
Guests of honor at the opening were Ma. Cecilia Locsin-Nava, recipient of the National Artist for Literature in behalf of Ramon Muzones Sr., La Consolacion College-Bacolod president Sr. Joan Brigida Corazon Infante, and Carlo Gabriel Pangilinan, 2019 Famas Best Director and senior lecturer of the University of the Philippines-Diliman.*