Hailing from a family of art collectors, Richie Lerma grew up surrounded by colors, history, and sophistication. His travels to different art museums around the world, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to various art galleries in Europe, exposed him to the international standards of art preservation, collection, and curation, even the business aspects of art. All his rich and colorful experiences have led him to ask himself what more he could do for the Philippine art scene.
The answer? Salcedo Auctions, established in 2010 by Richie, along with his wife Karen. He takes us back on his journey to founding Salcedo Auctions, a premier auction house in the Philippines.
Down memory lane
Passionate about the arts, Richie took up humanities in college. But a college course was nowhere near enough. He even took up other art courses in Europe. “In between undergraduate and postgraduate work, I also did some further studies in art history in Italy for a year,” he says. “I lived in Florence for a year, where I studied the art of the Renaissance.”
To apply what he gained learning about art growing up, Richie became director at the Ateneo Art Gallery, one of the country’s first modern art museums. Although he enjoyed his stint at the museum, he soon found himself and his family moving to Australia, where he and his wife Karen, a jewelry designer and art connoisseur, busied themselves visiting galleries and joining art auctions. Jose Rizal, in his novel Noli Me Tangere, has a phrase for it—el demonio de las comparaciones, translated for the Philippine participation in the Venice Art Biennale 2017 as “The Spectre of Comparison,” but the deeper Richie and Karen got into the art circles and goings-on in Australia, the more they thought about art in the Philippines and how else it could prosper and how they could help. This was how they realized one gap in the Philippine art scene—the auctions.
In those years, local art collectors had to travel abroad to bid for local artworks. This problem needed to be addressed. “Collectors during that time needed to travel to Hong Kong or Singapore just to bid for [Filipino] artworks. We made it a mission to change that and that is why we came back and opened Salcedo Auctions,” he says. “We thought that [it was] a platform that could be a future for the Philippines. We also thought that art auctions were an experience the Filipino audience would enjoy.”
Historic milestones
Since then, Salcedo Auctions has mounted several auctions, events, and art shows. Of all that it has accomplished, two things stood out the most for Richie—their discovery and successful auction of Juan Luna’s boceto of Spoliarium and La Pintura by Felix Resurreccion Hildalgo.
“Our discovery of boceto of Juan Luna’s Spoliarium, which we have successfully sold here in the country, is the most significant art find of recent memory,” he beams. “That’s the highest price for a work by Juan Luna ever sold in the Philippines, and only the second highest price for any artwork by Luna anywhere in the world at any point in time.”
But this record-breaking auction didn’t stop him and his team from doing more in the local art scene. A couple of years after the boceto’s successful auction came La Pintura by Felix Resurreccion Hildalgo.
“Another artwork that is very much attached to that because it belonged to the same family was the La Pintura by Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo. That was sold just three years after we sold the boceto,” Richie recalls. “So the two most significant Filipino artists in our history both hold records at Salcedo and we will be forever grateful for the opportunity to offer those pieces.”
For Richie, the mission is not yet done, far from it. His accomplishments have fueled him to reach more heights in promoting Philippine art not only to the international market but also to the Filipinos themselves. Still, he can only do that with the help of the people who make up this industry.
“For the Filipino artists, I think the most important consideration should always be creativity above all else—the market is secondary,” he says when asked for a message he wanted to impart to artists and collectors. “I encourage the collectors to continue supporting good Filipino art. Be discerning in terms of originality. Be discerning in terms of depth, be in depth. Be discerning in terms of technique and all of these different factors.”