Photo by PINGGOT ZULUETA

MANILA, Philippines — Early this year, Jerusalino “Jerry” Araos and his wife Melendre “Melen” started building their bahay-kubong bato – in one of three choice lots that bordered a man-made lagoon in posh Fairmont subdivision in Antipolo. The master sculptor began by trying to imagine the “magnificent inner skin” of the house; the inner spaces that had to embody his heart and bowels and ultimately project the symphony of his mind. Calling on wind, water, earth and fire as his co-builders, Araos conjured a design concept he called “ventral” – an acronym for ventilation, traffic and light.

Making a dream house was something that Jerry and Melen had wanted to do as early as 1988, when they bought their property at Fairmont . “I started to build then, but my plans kept getting frustrated,” Araos recalls. “Finally, I consulted a mumbaki (Indian word for babaylan) who I met in the Cordilleras when I was with the NPA (communist New People’s Army). He told me, ‘You have violated the sanctuary of the spirits of the pond.’” So Araos had to supplicate the spirits until he felt that permission had been granted to landscape the lots. He created a multi-tiered garden that gravitated to a beautiful pond in the middle of the properties. Then he wrote a book he titled "The Garden of Two Dragons Fucking."  For many years, lavish parties with relatives, friends and fellow artists lit up the place.

Is the new dream house a magnum opus?  “At my age (67), I no longer make those claims,” says Araos.  “I am making a sculptural but essential house where design and function are one.” A house carved from within, nurtured from the depths and shaped for life and poetry – this could be the biggest, livable and functional sculpture that Araos’ heart and mind will ever create.

But an incident happened before noon of November 6. From the second floor where he was designing a railing for the loft, he fell 10 feet down. Quick as a cat, he tried to break his fall by slapping down hard on the table where his forehead sustained a cut. But he bounced, hit the floor on his back and broke 16 ribs mostly on his left side. His precious hands which have chiseled so many ingenious torsos and sculptural furniture in the last 30 years turned black and blue from the trauma.

At the Capitol Medical Center in Quezon City where he was brought, he continued to build his house - with words and lectures: “A house is a living sculpture. Building a house is creating vacancies. In contrast, doing sculpture consists of shaping solids.” But in Araos’ studio in Antipolo and at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, the difference between high and functional art often disappears. Since the '80s when he became a sculptor, he has been interchanging art barriers; all his sculptural and functional pieces like tidal waves leap equally high to the pull of his imaginative moon.

Many of his friends believe the ebullient Araos would survive his fall last November.

They remember his expletive, “Ngatngatin mo!”(Try me!) whenever he faced challenges in the past. The late curator Bobi Valenzuela likened Araos to Zorba the Greek, the unsinkable character of novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, who danced away life’s tragedies, and outsmarted the imposing maladies of life and health.

Just before his accident, Araos had finished some trays that suggested fragments of a woman’s torso. Last December 13, the Crucible Gallery in SM mall on EDSA presented them in a show entitled “Tactile Glimpses of the Human Form.” Although Araos failed to attend the opening, he was victorious because his doctors allowed him to return home. Modern medicine, his “family’s love and hugs,” and his “eternal excitement to just continue with art (making)” healed him, he says.

Abstract versus well articulated torsos 

There is a liberating quality in Araos’ intentionally abstract figures in his show at Crucible this year. Araos has moved from well-contoured, over-articulated and expressionistic torsos (he started making in the '90s, under the influence of Aristides Maillol, 1861-1944) to an abstraction of the same “by choice”. On his philosophy on changing art forms, he notes: “When an artist creates a realistic form, there is always a basis for his audience to judge whether he has captured the form (from life) or not. Abstraction (on the other hand) is something that is seen in front of one’s eyes and imagined at the back of one’s mind. A real (abstract) artist knows if he has captured the form at the back of his mind.”  Further: “From any chosen medium, a sculptor starts liberating the figure from the block; but abstraction is liberating the subject from the figure.”

It is easy to see the fusion of trays and women as a symbol of fused function and form; or of the artist completing a definition of the human body, which, in real life, has two essences, beauty and purpose. But Araos has also depicted three portraits of Egyptian goddess Isis (bird-woman figure), entitled “Theology of Liberation” which, for him, narrates a woman’s epic: her age of oppression, depicted by a downtrodden woman-tray presented upside down; her era of revolution, shown by a taller and upright woman-tray; and her true liberation, revealed by a well contoured outline of a woman’s “ethereal” body that no longer serves as a tray. Sealing a woman’s victory for empowerment, in sculpture, makes Araos a male feminist sculptor.

The roundish back of his tray may look like a woman’s pregnant belly, but Araos has sculpted it with a discerning revelation of the psychology of its (pregnant belly’s) inner space where the unborn child, still blind but with a defined sense of smell, becomes a  being, first, by smelling its mother’s armpit, near the breast, and starts (from the womb) its “tactile glimpses of the human body (the mother’s)”.

A breakthrough in this show at Crucible is Araos’ uncanny and arduous creation of the inner sculpture where all things human and divine are remembered. If he has started to tread on a very difficult plane of interpenetrating the material and the immaterial, he has already arrived at his very own poetics or mysticism of wooden sculpture.  

This shift in Araos’ sculptural reflections strangely parallels his changing health condition.

In late 2009, when he began diabetes-induced dialysis, he needed only 13-chisel strikes to quickly create a design on wood, better than his average of 26-chisel strikes to achieve the same thing after he survived a stroke in December 2007. When he was in his mid 30s in the '80s, a five-chisel strike could already reveal a well articulated arm on wood.

Dancing Torso 

The 2007 edition of his dancing torso at Crucible Gallery (made while recuperating from a stroke) re-established his mastery of the human form and his adeptness at creating interpenetrating voids on the torso – some of which run like a crackling fault-line towards the inner area of the neck down to the deep bowels of the body. “The concept is all about interpenetrating solids and spaces,” Araos describes the birthing of the 2007 dancing torso.

Here, Araos’ dancing torsos in hard and heavy wood leap as if suspended on air; pencil lines of flight streak the wooden material, suggesting movement, out-of-wood somersaults away from a torso’s solid thigh, which is balanced on the ground. The voluptuous dancing torsos whisper and sing like a musical organ, with low and high-pitched sounds. They are loud and quiet, open and closed. One piece alone is both a solo and an orchestra.

An earlier torso work would have a deeper, dancing cut parallel to the body’s line; more acrobatic interpenetration of solids and spaces that defy the wood’s endurance, and man’s imagination. Araos has made more than 30 of these perfect and unparalleled torsos since the '90s.

“I relate to the wood; its hardness mocks me. My steps towards it are always measured. In turn, it follows me; it talks to me,” he says, telling how his pieces are created. The intensity of wrenching a response from his favorite material would impel him to curses and expletives that others (artists and non-artists as well) often reacted to as unbearable and animalistic assaults.

Sculptural furniture 

Talking about furniture as art, Araos says, “The chair is the negative mold of the human form. If you can create a correct human form, then you should be able to perfect the best negative form. To prove it, you must sit on that chair.” He would often turn his chairs, tables, and beds upside down to show off their voluptuous sculptural beauty.

Gutsy revolutionary 

When he was young, gutsy and idealistic in the late '60s, Araos took a gun and joined the NPA in the mountains of northern Luzon . He was eventually captured and thrown into a detention cell. “Nabartolina ako nuon, pero ‘di nila ako magalaw,” he recalls the horrors of prison and torture. This experience gave birth to his first art exhibit entitled “Bartolina” at Manila ’s Hiraya Gallery in 1980.

In the exhibit, innocent children happily played hide and seek in the womb-like bartolina spaces of his sculptured chairs. His early art works included heavy-looking wooden birds with broken glass wings that moved dispiritedly perched on coiled iron feet.

Toys and family-centered sculptures 

In less than a year, Araos discarded his gloomy pieces.  This happened in 1983 when he bought a log of kulantas wood from a boat maker who had abandoned his craft.  The wood was “impervious to wet and dry rot, and perfect for boat-making,” he says. The sculptor made it into a massive, organically shaped, and yet cuddly seesaw that he named: “Parenting for Justice,” or “Ugoy sa Duyan.”

“If I had made only one piece like this one as a sculptor, I will be very happy,” says Araos. Why? “It has love of family, it has music, it has poetry. It is an art work which encourages interaction.”

Araos’ best torsos are also centered on wife and family. “Fifteen Minutes Before” is a virginal torso of wife Melen before their first intimacy; “Melen’s Chakra” is a female form with a slackened belly and a suggestive fetus (for fertility).

Explaining why he has chosen not to depict violence in his art, Araos says, “The underground was a diaphanous period in my life: I did not know then when it ended, when it began. After living a life of violence, I came to realize that I should carry the burden of raising my family. I wanted to please my wife and to make my children happy. Life spirals upward, not downward.” Being creative is also to celebrate freedom. “In a society where censorship is the norm, the artist can always evade censorship,” he adds.

Having shaped the scars and storms of his life in art forms that are poetic, elevated and celebratory, Araos says: “I feel achieved, happy. I cannot ask for anything more. I have six children and seven grandchildren.” Engaging them in art-making, making art a family feast and not his lonesome solitary activity, he says, is his best gift to his wife and children.

Araos’ best works with Melen are: Mendiola “Waya Waya,” a chef and restauranteur; Milfuego Jimel, a dairy farmer/cheese maker; Rojina “Roja,” a US-based restaurant manager; Maria Liza Justine “Liwliwa,” an Australia-based photographer-nurse; Mira Tala, a US-based nurse; and Julian Severiano, a sculptor in the image of his father.