Ang Kiukok and the Filipino Repast From the personal collection of the author of “Kiukok: Deconstructing Despair”
\nAng Kiukok’s Breakfast I unites the artist’s most beloved and recognizable themes: the fish and the still life. The work exemplifies Kiukok’s artistic preoccupation in the earliest phases of his career, which Alice Coseteng perfectly described in her Manila Chronicle column.
\n“Ang Kiu Kok, who is perhaps one of the most promising young painters in the country today…seems to manipulate lines and geometric volumes with adequate control,” Coseteng wrote. “This feeling, this certainty for solids and perspectives as visual designs is, of course, to the advantage of the artist. Using the minimum of means, he defines his bare forms through thick, bold black lines against subdued, indistinct background. The result is a virtuoso-like and, at times, subtle interplay of definite planes and volumes, line, and perspective. The muted color of the background simultaneously absorbs and sets off his designs. In his approach, the artist is stark, simple, and rather sober.”
\nThe spareness and the sense of somber serenity in Kiukok’s early works mirrored his real-life disposition; he was shy, timid, modest, and soft-spoken. Kiukok’s keen sense for composition and design paralleled his neatness and inclination towards organization as a painter. “Ayoko ng magulo. [I don’t like disorder],” Kiukok once said in a July 1983 interview with Cid Reyes.
\nKiukok’s breakfast table is that of a typical Filipino setup. There is the morning staple daing (dried fish) and the ubiquitous thermos filled with freshly brewed coffee, all set in a dining room adorned with the crucifix (in lieu of the famous Last Supper), a manifestation of the Pinoy family tradition of saying grace before and after meals. The work shows Kiukok’s strong Chinese influences, his monochromatic palette evoking Chinese traditional landscape painting. However, Kiukok’s strongly delineated lines arrive closer to the Filipino modernist spirit, bringing a delicate tension between the starkness of his forms and the flatness of the space. Breakfast I brings to mind the still lifes of Arturo Luz, one of Kiukok’s early artistic influences.
\nIn addition, Ang Kiukok’s preference for a monochromatic composition echoes his fastidious dedication to the discipline of drawing, a tenet he learned by heart from Manansala, who was known to draw prolifically and with sheer dexterity. “Drawing makes up the bones of Ang Kiukok’s paintings,” writes Alfredo Roces in his book Kiukok: Deconstructing Despair. “For years, he would draw every evening, sometimes for as long as three hours, building up a hoard of construction plans for future paintings. Such a rigid ritual of drawing makes him purposeful, disciplined, dexterous. He completes as many as ten drawings a day.”
\nKiukok’s discipline in drawing makes his monochromatic paintings among the most important in his oeuvre, as they show the solidity of his linear configurations that form the very backbone of his compositions. (Adrian Maranan)
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