“The Changing image of the Filipina ” (The Arts)

“…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.”

- Alice G. Guillermo