“…The
same sense of moral violation is expressed in Roy
Veneracion’s ‘Mutya ng Pag-ibig’.
The central image is that of a poor Filipino family,
the woman looking anxiously to the future while
sheltering her child with her arms, and the father
crying out and raising his flayed and bleeding arms
in protest. They are flanked by the two contrasting
figures of the beautiful female nude on the left,
symbolizing the Filipina, and the robot at the right
against a background of factories spewing smoke,
symbol of dehumanization and ecological destruction.
A heart surrounded with barbed wire, an image of
intense pain, is above the crossed flags of the
Philippines and the United States, thus implying
the human suffering that ensues from their avowed
‘special friendship’. The human figures
have a vividness of form and color, striking in
expressive qualities, and the work as a whole shows
that Veneracion's artistic talent in figurative
art of socio-political meaning should not be lost
but should rather be pursued and developed to the
full, for it is here, and not so much in his textural
abstracts, that he will make his lasting mark on
the country’s art scene.”
“…The
same sense of moral violation is expressed in Roy
Veneracion’s ‘Mutya ng Pag-ibig’.
The central image is that of a poor Filipino family,
the woman looking anxiously to the future while
sheltering her child with her arms, and the father
crying out and raising his flayed and bleeding arms
in protest. They are flanked by the two contrasting
figures of the beautiful female nude on the left,
symbolizing the Filipina, and the robot at the right
against a background of factories spewing smoke,
symbol of dehumanization and ecological destruction.
A heart surrounded with barbed wire, an image of
intense pain, is above the crossed flags of the
Philippines and the United States, thus implying
the human suffering that ensues from their avowed
‘special friendship’. The human figures
have a vividness of form and color, striking in
expressive qualities, and the work as a whole shows
that Veneracion's artistic talent in figurative
art of socio-political meaning should not be lost
but should rather be pursued and developed to the
full, for it is here, and not so much in his textural
abstracts, that he will make his lasting mark on
the country’s art scene.”
