Nena Saguil was a Filipino modernist painter best known for her pioneering cosmic abstractions. Saguil’s Untitled (Abstract) (1972) highlights her protean handling of circular forms to cosmic ends. The circle is mobilised in various ways upon the canvas: small textured dots encrust the surface, encircling and often comprising larger organic forms – themselves clustered, concentric, and/or overlapping. Within this composition, the shape is at once a prime element, a means of relation, and a governing structure, all rendered in gradients of colour to disorienting effect. This proliferation shows the porosity of sight, sense, and scale that Saguil’s treatment achieves: as one’s reading shifts between atomic and planetary associations, the artist’s singular geometries offer possible insights into the patterns undergirding worlds small and large. This is the first time the work of Nena Saguil is presented at Biennale Arte.
—C J Salapare
