{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":1764,"auction_id":3,"set_id":4,"lot_number":"76","artist":"Emmanuel Garibay (b. 1962)","title":"Sagrada Familia","starting_price":400000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2001 (lower left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"36\" x 34\" (91 cm x 86 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private Collection, Iloilo City","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"In his works revolving around Christianity and theology, Emmanuel Garibay has always aimed to situate Jesus Christ, the saints, and other religious figures within the context of the Filipino masses. Garibay is well-versed in theology, holding a Master of Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary in Cavite. Garibay then has been using this learning to amplify the repressed voices of the impoverished with a kind of Christianity that is closer to the masses' experience. In Rod Pattenden's article \"Recognizing the Stranger: The Art of Emmanuel Garibay,\" the artist remarks: \"I am concerned to find a Jesus who is contextualized into our own life and national situation. A Filipino Jesus continues to be part of the colonial past that is still present. This is a Jesus with a four-hundred- year history who looks white. The church continues to support this colonial view and allows it be embellished with gold, and therefore, more importantly with power and authority.\"
\nThe previous statement resonates more deeply with Garibay's evocative depictions of the Holy Family, a subject that has seen several interpretations in his oeuvre. Garibay touches on the Filipinos' affinity for the family to present an unvarnished image of the Filipino family, stripped of any romanticization. A prominent example is this 2001 work titled Sagrada Familia. Here, Garibay depicts a family of three living in a jeepney, which, for many Filipino urban poor families, serves as their means of sustenance and habitation.
\nGaribay enkindles a new way of seeing through this work. Far from the majestic depictions of the Holy Family in traditional Christian art, Garibay's Sagrada Familia situates the image of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus within the people's material conditions, emphasizing the precarious living of many Filipino families. The family's nakedness represents vulnerability. As one can see, the mother's and father's lips are intentionally left out, symbolizing how the voices of the masses are repressed, their grievances suppressed, and their actions brutally stifled by those in power. Like in his other variations of the Holy Family, the jeepney, according to Garibay, also alludes to running away from the endless cycle that is poverty and oppression, resembling the Holy family's flight to Egypt to escape Herod's persecution.
\nBut hope remains, however elusive it may be. Garibay shifts the viewer's attention to the child, the work's central figure. Alluding to Rizal's famous line in his A la juventud filipina, Garibay espouses the belief that the youth remains the \"fair hope\" of the motherland; they are inherently and historically militant and progressive and possess innate vigor. The child is depicted in the Salvatore Mundi pose, a metaphor evoking Emmanuel Lacaba's enduring maxim, \"Awakened, the masses are Messiah!\" The same goes for the radiant halos surrounding the figures' heads, representing that the people are an enlightened force who possess the power to overthrow the triangle of oppression.
\nThrough this work, Garibay instills that God is ever-present in the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the wailing masses. God incarnate through Jesus was born poor, raised poor, and died poor and persecuted, which is the brutal reality for many Filipino families. Contextualizing the image of the merciful, omnipotent, and omnipresent God within the actual situation of many Filipinos is a road towards a liberating Christianity and theology, in which humans are humanized, religion is transformed into an instrument of dissent, and God's image becomes more empathetic, i.e., able to partake in the masses' suffering. (A.M.)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"
Emmanuel Garibay (b. 1962) Sagrada Familia signed and dated 2001 (lower left) oil on canvas 36\" x 34\" (91 cm x 86 cm)