Painter Norberto Carating held his first solo exhibition exactly 40 years ago at Galerie Bleue in Rustan’s Makati.
This week, at Now Gallery on Pasong Tamo Avenue Extension, he is holding his last, aptly titled “Last Full Show.”
“It’s time to give way to younger artists,” says the University of the Philippines graduate (BFA Advertising Design ’71) and Thirteen Artists Awardee (1990).
Not every artist has the luxury of plotting his timetable, but Carating seems to have mastered control of both his career and canvas.
Most of the 20 works that will be on exhibit mirror his calm and restrained personality: metallic colors that gradually fade into each other, in hard-edge geometric shapes, carved out of thick layers of acrylic paint and revealing subtle hints of color underneath.
Except for a few works, like “Red Earth #1” where he retires his id and welcomes back his old expressionist self that reveled in dribbles and splashes of paint.
These big gestures, at some point in his career, were not totally unfamiliar to Carating.
Beginnings
In 1975, when he won the grand award at the 25th annual competition of the Arts Association of the Philippines, Carating was painting dimly lit but richly textured images of the underworld.
This “Lamanlupa” series was inspired by the brief period he lived with his aunts in Angat, Bulacan, together with his twin sister.
His aunts constantly warned them of the harm that would befall them if they disturbed the mythical creatures that supposedly lived in the farm fields, and this led him to believe in their existence.
In the early 1980s, after visiting Batangas with some American scuba divers, he evolved into his “Anilao” series which, compared to “Lamanlupa,” were bright and colorful.
At that time, he was balancing a career in both painting and opera singing—he had taken voice lessons under baritone Aurelio Estanislao and soprano Luisa Tapales.
Carating, with his booming voice and towering height, performed with the likes of leading sopranos Fides Cuyugan-Asensio, Irma Potenciano and Nanette Moscardon-Maigue in productions that toured Canada and the United States.
But by 1985, after playing the leading role in the Cultural Center of the Philippines production of “La Loba Negra,” he called it quits and focused on painting.
He also turned his back on the regimented techniques he used in his “Lamanlupa” and “Anilao” series and dove into gestural abstraction, using a wide spectrum of bright colors.
It’s this phase that “Red Earth #1” reminds us of.
Personal life
These days, Carating enjoys his routines.
Mornings and early afternoons are spent painting at his Quezon City studio. On late afternoons, he heads to Loyola Park Marikina to visit his parents’ grave.
He lost his 99-year-old mother in 2009 to old age. His father, who was an assistant director of New Bilibid Prisons Reservation, had died in 1981 because of a heart attack and complications brought about by diabetes.
It was at the New Bilibid Prisons where a young Carating saw the Mindanao insurgent commander Camlon and gang leader Nardong Putik, and witnessed the execution of Jaime José, the convicted rapist of actress Maggie dela Riva.
During college, he was part of a group distributing art materials to prisoners and it was there he met maximum security prisoner Benjamin Mendoza, the Bolivian painter who tried to assassinate Pope Paul VI at the international airport in 1970.
Mendoza would specify what art materials he wanted and, once, even asked for a bird that he could train in jail.
These days, Carating rarely talks about art—but you can catch him talking about his peers, especially those who have passed away, like printmaker Mario Parial and book designer Nik Ricio, who both died in December.
His contemporaries include Nestor Vinluan and Glenn Bautista, but he prefers to shy from the limelight, not calling attention to the fact that his works are displayed in the country’s most expensive homes.
In 2012, Bulwagan ng Dangal, UP’s heritage museum, held a three-month Carating retrospective show that included portaitures he made during his days in university.
The breadth of paintings on display was powerful and informative of Carating’s progression as an artist.
But ask him now what his works represent, why his paintings are so clean, Zen and deliberate, and he scoffs: “Why does a painting need to have an explanation? Why does it need to have a purpose? You lose the magic of art when you ask the artist too many things. Let it be.”
“Last Full Show,” featuring the works of Norberto Carating, opens Jan 23, 6 p.m., at Now Gallery, Unit G05 Ecoplaza Building, 2305 Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati; tel. 5550683. It will run until Feb. 8.
The author is the editor of Coconuts Manila (www.coconutsmanila.com), a hyperlocal website about Metro Manila.