By Johnathan Libarios Rondina
Philippine Daily Inquirer 06/04/2007

MANILA, Philippines – For anyone, a sudden, unexpected brush with mortality can be a harrowing yet spiritual experience. For artist Raul Piedra, that experience came in the wake of a particularly frenzied period late last year.

A one-man show was underway and a commissioned mural was due, leaving him exhausted and, quite literally, breathless. What he stubbornly dismissed as asthma turned out to be a stress-induced coronary thrombosis that put him in intensive care for one week.

It might have been a mild heart attack, but its impact was no less profound for Piedra, who took the experience as an invitation for serious and continuing introspection.

Richly textured life

What Piedra is likely to find in his soul-searching is a life as boldly hued and as richly textured as his paintings.

Born in 1951 in San Fernando, Pampanga, and raised in Tondo, Manila, he found his artistic calling after winning a school art competition. He later pursued art studies at Philippine Women’s University.

Those long, dark days of martial law saw Piedra retreating to Pampanga, where he spent his early years as a struggling artist. Like many of his contemporaries, Piedra sold commercial folk art, drawings of fish on paper that was food on the table for his growing family.

In 1984, he received a grant from the Victoria Art Council of Melbourne, a career-changing opportunity which allowed him to work in Australia and New Zealand, where, faced with cutthroat competition, he learned to strengthen his artistic resolve.

This determination earned him a good reputation in New Zealand, where, despite being a foreigner, he was nominated as one the country’s most notable emerging artists.

Today, Piedra, 56, is an esteemed artist best known for his textured abstraction in mixed media. His works, a favorite among interior designers and architects, now welcome guests in posh hotels in the Philippines and abroad, and adorn the walls of popular establishments and industrial spaces as well as those in the homes of serious art collectors.

While his last exhibit, “Gentle Winds,” at The Room Upstairs Gallery, staged post-confinement, showcased a subdued, contemplative Piedra, in “Earthbound,” his latest one-man show at Serendra’s Galerie E in Fort Bonifacio, the artist aims to mark yet another career milestone by presenting a series of 14 paintings done in his signature textured style combined with promising new experimentations in mixed media.

Earth’s dynamic

The earth and its myriad surfaces and landscapes have long fascinated Piedra, whose family name literally means “rock.” Thus, he defines his many travels in and outside of the Philippines as “adventures in texture,” study explorations that allow him to investigate nuances in the look, feel, and composition of different terrains, including rock formations and arrangements, mud consistency in rice paddies, soil quality in different altitudes, and sand coarseness in different beaches.

He then mimics these topographic variances in his canvases by using a unique mixture of paint and industrial materials. Acrylic, Piedra’s favorite medium, is itself a strong adhesive. Mixing this with sand reinforced with decortex and marble paste, Piedra creates tactile protrusions on his canvases that echo the earth’s dynamic, often unpredictable, sometimes violent temperament.

This technique is apparent in the show’s signature piece “Earthbound” (36”x48”) and in “Red Earth” (36”x36”), both reminiscent of the artist’s 2002 “Gabon” series, shown in Megamall’s Gallery Nine, which paid homage to Pampanga’s lahar-ravaged terrain.

In Renaissance Europe, artists were practically regarded as illusionists whose worth was determined by their abilities to conjure “magical” surfaces on a flat canvas. Piedra’s canvases, seen in this context, are visually engaging sleight-of-hand enchantments.

The signature piece when juxtaposed against “Wave” (48”x60”), the other large work in this series, is a study in contrasts and manifests Piedra’s wide compositional range.

The first, vibrant in its green, yellow-orange hues, spattered with coarse, globular formations, is forceful, almost impatient but for its symmetric proportions. The second, in cobalt-blue and aquamarine, is etched with studied temperance; it evokes calmness, appearing like an exotic tapestry, or like the tranquil earth viewed from space.

Playing with fire

More significantly, however, “Earthbound” may be seen as the unavoidable consequence of Piedra’s current introspective mood. Here his aesthetic markedly evolves as his canvas expands to include metal surfaces. What emerges is a compelling series of images born of fire and metal.

“Crossroad” (24”x24”), an allusion to the artist’s emerging transition, combines three of his distinct techniques at texture-building, where the larger portion is appropriated for stainless aluminum.

These “stainless canvases” are textured by blowtorching different chemicals and paint onto the sheets and glazing them with varnish. To achieve this effect, Piedra spends countless hours studying how different materials burn and how fire crawls on metal.

Lines serve several purposes in Piedra’s works. Semiotically, as in “Forms in Space” 1-2 (diptych, 24”x24”), they connote a sense of equilibrium, geometric delineations that are a necessary ingredient in the artist’s exposition of the organic.

But in this initial exploration into terra incognita, these dividing lines also identify technical boundaries between the natural and the synthetic, and what appears to be the looming convergence of both as shown in “Mist” (30”x40”), a haunting minimalist composition halved by distinct canvases divided and connected by a thin red line.

These lines finally dissolve, almost completely, in “Between Spaces” (24”x24”), perhaps signaling what has yet to come.

“Every artist,” he says, “must make a commitment to blaze trails.”

Mortality, although inevitable, is after all tempered by evolution. In “Earthbound,” Raul Piedra, artist almost interrupted, makes a profound commitment to his unfinished textured life and art.

“Earthbound: New Works by Raul Piedra” runs June 4-24 in Galerie E, 2/F, Serendra Shops, Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. Call 9153840.