Federico Aguilar Alcuaz’s Tres Marias series is among his most famous, a series that critic Alice Guillermo described in 2007 as a genre of “beautiful, long-gowned women with a 19th-century air engaged in a variety of domestic activities.”
\n“The Tres Marias series was painted between 1978 and 1979,” adds Aguilar Alcuaz’s older brother Mariano “Ovit” Aguilar Jr. in Rod Paras-Perez’s Parallel Texts. “The subjects were waitresses at Cafe Coquilla, Rotisserie and the Chinese restaurant in the Manila Hilton, where he is staying. The paintings were done during the free hours or breaks of these waitresses.”
\nIn this particular Tres Maria, Aguilar Alcuaz eschews the long Spanish gowns for a traditional Filipino one. His women are clad in a Maria Clara style of Filipiniana, complete with the massive shawl that covers their shoulders and their arms. Two of the three women stood gossiping while the remaining one sat with her hands folded on her lap. It is evident from their clothes and their surroundings that these women belong to the upper class, thus provided with a modicum of privacy.
\n“The [Tres Marias] paintings could invoke by themselves [various] anecdotes,” Alcuaz writes about a different Tres Marias painting in a December 22, 1981 journal. Indeed, this phrase could be used in many other Tres Marias paintings, including this one. His Tres Marias provide a tableau of the inner workings of the lives often not depicted elsewhere. These women – mothers, daughters, wives, sisters – briefly drop their societal titles and exist as is, creating a world that for a moment is only theirs. In Alcuaz’s many iterations of the Marias, he has told a myriad of stories that open themselves up to multiple interpretations. They are, in a way, ever-evolving and ever-growing, allowing the viewers to connect to them in a personal way. (Hannah Valiente)
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