Celeste Comes in Colours

Batanguena in Spontanrealismus, 2018

She comes in colours ev’rywhere;
She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming colours in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colours

Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, from the song She’s a Rainbow, on Their Satanic Majesties Request Album, 1967

Celeste Lecaroz (Celeste Lecaroz - Aceron y Salud) hit the ground running with her first solo exhibition, in May 2018, titled “Lecaroz Spontanrealismus”, after having been painting for only two years. Lecaroz  developed her artwork in a style which she has referred to as “Lecaroz Spontanrealismus” (or Lecaroz Spontaneous Realism), styled after the work of ‘Spontaneous Realism’ by the neo-Fauve Austrian artist Voka.  Voka describes "Every painting is an impulsive challenge that starts with a first idea and ends with the final brush stroke, and each brush stroke decides over victory or defeat.” Lacaroz, like Voka and the “Les Fauves” (The Fauves) before him, has a distinct “dialogue with colours.” For she creates her vivid imagery full of gusto, verve and robust colour.

In the early 1900s, Fauves’ initiators were Henri Matisse, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Maurice de Vlaminck,  Albert Marquet, Kees Van Dongen, and Othon Friesz. The Fauves, meaning the ‘Wild Beasts’, had been so named by the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles due to the shocking non-natural colouration of their canvases. Incidently The Fauves are believed to be the first real ‘Modernist’ painters and leaders of avant-garde art, due to their use of colour as expression rather than mimesis.

Fauve Henri Matisse had written (in ‘Notes d'un peintre’ in La Grande Revue, Paris, 25 December 1908) that…

“Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or
manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is
expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them,
the proportions, everything has its share. Composition is the art of arranging
in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's command to express
his feelings. In a picture every part will be visible and will play its appointed
role, whether it be principal or secondary. Everything that is not useful in the
picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety:
any superfluous detail would replace some other essential detail in the mind of
· the spectator.”

Although Celeste’s Filipino artistic predecessor, Victorio Edades (1895 to 1985), has been proclaimed as the “Father of Philippine Modern Art”, it is Fernando Amorsolo y Cueto (1982 to 1972) who brought the sunshine into Philippine painting. He coloured rural imagery full of Post-Impressionist lightness, typified by his paintings ‘Workers in the Field’ (1926) and ’The Tinikling’ (1946), whereas Edades was inclined to more sombre representations. It is Fernando Amorsolo y Cueto’s tradition of colour in the art of The Philippines, which re-emerges with the flamboyant imagery of Celeste Lecaroz.

Henri Matisse also wrote (again from ‘Notes’) that….

“The chief function of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my tones without a preconceived plan…..I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones
there must result a living harmony of colours, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

Jay Maisel (in his book “Light, Gesture & Color”) reminds us that…

“Color is seductive. It changes as it interacts with other colors, it changes because of the light falling upon it, and it changes as it becomes larger in size. This last aspect can be seen in the tears and rage of anyone who has chosen a color based on a two-inch sample and painted an entire room in it.”

From the Impressionist’s (1860 onward) with their scientific approach to colour, to Georges Seurat and Paul Signac’s Pointillism (mid 1880s) and those artists who have been deemed Post-Impressionist all were developing fresh ways of painting the art subject. Colour was an integral part of this. Artists began to move away from the colours they perceived directly from the subject, away from what might be noted as a cold clear naturalism, and trying desperately to emulate the colours they thought they saw before them, to investing feeling, and emotion, into the equation.

This led to emotive exploration by a group so named “Les Nabis” (or ‘The Prophets’ ,1880 to 1900s) who worked towards a stylised flatness of colour, often using decorative elements as seen in Paul Élie Ranson’s painting ‘Nu se coiffant au bord de l’étang’ (1897), a variation on the artistic ‘Bathers’ meme. Post-Impressionists (from 1886 onwards) like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Alfred Wolmark worked with heightened colouration and emotive form, as witnessed in Gauguin’s ‘Vision after Sermon (Jacob Wrestling)’ (1888), Van Gogh’s ‘The Mulberry Tree’ (1889) and Wolmark’s ‘Decorative Still Life’ (1911).

A flamboyant use of colour had been developing in the West which eventuated in the aforementioned works of  those painterly wild beasts “Les Fauves” (1905 to 1910), and a wonderful quote from Henri Matisse “...when I put down a green, it doesn't mean grass; and when I put down a blue, it doesn't mean the sky.” Colour, in a sense, had been set free from the subject and enchained only by imagination and emotion, aided and abetted by science and new ways of manufacturing brighter tube paint pigments.

Further to this, Nathalia Brodskaïa, in her book ‘The Fauves’ (1995, pp30) writes…

“Their painting [the Fauves] brought out the very thing inherent in the medium: the capacity of oil paints to set in pastose clots or to spread in a thin layer making it possible for one colour to penetrate into another without losing its purity and resonance in the process. They were united by a genuine, feverish delight in the possibilities offered by a bare canvas and tubes of oil paint….”

The advent of Otto Röhm creating acrylic resin, in the 1930s, later heralded the notion of acrylic paint, and changed the way painters painted. Artists such as David Hockney, Roy Lichenstein and Andy Warhol, in the 1960s, championed acrylic paint because of its perceived diversity and quick drying properties. Since those days the quality of acrylic paints has improved no end, as has the initially limited colour range. New testing standards suggest that the new acrylic paints will be lightfast between 50 and 100 years.

Acrylic paints enable Celeste Lecaroz to rapidly capture her images without having to wait inordinate amounts of time before applying fresh colours. She is able to react in a spontaneous manner, and create in a figurative, some might say realistic, fashion. Hence her reflection of Voka’s ‘Spontaneous Realism’ while simultaneously giving an art historical nod to her predecessors, Filipino and foreign.