Genesis Tapestry

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To know more about this artwork, watch its feature from CCP's Cultural Cache Online video series: Cultural Cache Online: Episode 3 feat. Genesis by HR Ocampo, with Dr. Jaime Laya

This immense tapestry of flame-like Cubist form is installed as the fire curtain of the Main Theater of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Center (CCP) for the Performing Arts. Fabricated in Kyoto, Japan as an enlargement of small oil on canvas painting owned by the family of Architect Leandro V. Locsin, architect of the building, “Genesis” maintains the qualities of the original oil painting. The curtain version is faithful to the palette of the original. The composition is typical of much of the work of the painter, Hernando R. Ocampo, National Artist. And the Cubism can be interpreted with acknowledgement of Ocampo’s simultaneous career as poet and journalist. The content can be one or many, or one and many simultaneously, in the same vein as a supposedly cold Cubism is, here, simultaneously fiery imagery.

A curator’s commentary

That Ocampo entitled the work “Genesis” and thus solicited response in the direction of metaphor, can be taken to another direction: its contrast with traditional artmaking that embodies rather than represents. The reptilian figures that tend of appear in traditional weaving and carving and indeed even in metalworking and pottery are all mythologically associated with various local concepts of genesis. These figures belong to the generation of life. Which can occasion a definition of contrast: in Ocampo’s Modernism, genesis is metaphoric. In traditional Philippine art, genesis is embodied in metamorphosing reptiles.

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