The art of Fernando Zóbel has always been a mystery to be unraveled.  By turns spontaneous yet controlled, dramatic yet serene, his works are full of contradictions, having more to to do with seething, unseen volcanos whose outlines of lava are only revealed when they disturb the white plains of his canvases.

These artworks would come from secret places, too: A trip to Japan where he became enamored with the rhythmic rake patterns of its gardens’ sands (so much so that he built a home surrounded with that country’s stoic rock gardens). His experiments with a syringe expressed this mute grace as did works inspired from the wail of Spanish gypsies to create the Saeta.

So did his explorations of classical art, interactions with Andrea Mantegna, for example — the shadow of Caesar’s chariot wheel here, and Evaristo Baschenis, a loaf of bread and a boy there, would make him even more tantalizing. Ironically, his handwritten notes scattered on the artworks’ edges would only offer him that much more enigmatic but tantalizing glimpses of his mind.

Finally, the complete nature of Fernando Zobel has been at last revealed in a stupendous exhibit in the granite rooms of the Jerónimos Cloisters of the Prado in Madrid. (The show runs till March 5, 2023 and is expected to journey to Manila in the next two years.) It is significant several times over : Firstly because the Museo del Prado is one of the world’s most exceptional repositories of art; (some say even its greatest). Secondly, because its mandate is devoted exclusively to the breadth of medieval to 19th-century art; (modern art is to be found in other locations such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza or Reina Sofia Museums). Thus, having surveyed all that, to have the abstract works of a Filipino-Spanish artist featured in its august halls is a unique moment in art history. Pablo Picasso has been the only other exception to the Prado’s rules.

Titled Zóbel : The Future of the Past, the exhibit is a mind-bending journey with the great artist, following a trajectory that would be familiar to Filipinos since it is a road traveled through our colonial past, from Manila to the United States to Madrid. It is the brainchild of the Harvard scholar Felipe Pereda, professor of Spanish art in the United States in the same university. He co-curated the show with Mr. Manuel Fontán del Junco, director of Museums and Exhibitions at Fundación Juan March and director of the Spanish Abstract Art Museum of Cuenca.

Señor Pereda has devoted seven years in creating this exceptional study of a single artist’s outlook and process. It covers his works as a painter from the 1950s to the 1980s, exemplified by 42 paintings gathered from all over the world including the Philippines. More importantly, it has plucked from oblivion 51 sketchbooks as well as 85 drawings and graphic works that give enormous and fresh insight to the man.

Zóbel is thus revealed — in all his complexity — as artist, scholar, a serious collector of books and, with a special humility, other people’s art. As a result, he made innumerable donations to the Ateneo Art Gallery of his seminal pieces as well as of those of the first post-war modern art movement in the country— thus singlehandedly establishing the Philippines’ first modern art museum in the same way that he founded the Museum of Spanish Modern Art in Cuenca. He would also generously give various legacies to the Houghton Library, the Prado itself, and the excellent Fundacion Juan March.

Zóbel was a voracious traveller who marveled at the ordinary (football games to be found in ‘Futbol XIII’ from the Charles Luzuriaga collection) as well as the majestic (Stonehenge) and the heroic (‘Dos de Mayo II’ from the Miguel Ramos Collection), although Pereda would note “that in his mind, he never really left Manila, a place that Zóbel continuously thought of until the moment of his death.”

He was also a compulsive diarist. Professor Pereda would note that he was also unerring, never correcting nor crossing out what was a perfect, unblemished stream of consciousness recorded in hundreds of notebooks. The artist was also meditative and reflective, says Pereda, and thus also careful and calculating with his work. Each painting would be the product of reams of “preparatory drawings, sketches, as well as photographs” that also involved “geometric analysis,” exclaims Pereda. He confirms, “It was an extremely slow process”, no matter if in his later life, he had begun to create landscapes in the plein air. In this way would he create scenes of his recognizable “visual poetry,” as the professor terms it.

At his very core, says Professor Pereda, Zóbel was “a humanist,” and in the truest sense, “a renaissance man” whose curiosity of the world was all-abiding. The exhibition captures this zest for life, going beyond the usual white-cube array of paintings and unravelling step-by-step key works through Zóbel’s own notes and drawings.

The show is also so immersive in its detail as to resemble a single, giant installation. There are ample wall texts and displays of the caricatures, documents, and various snapshots and slivers of a fully engaged life. A documentary, another labor of love spanning three years says the professor, “tells Zóbel’s life story — and his collective memories of living in Spain, Manila, and New England”  and is screened in a separate room. Beside it is a hall with a biographical collage.

The whole Zóbel de Ayala family turned out in support of the event along with various collectors and art enthusiasts from both Madrid and Manila.

In time for the exhibit, Zóbel’s catalogue raisonné, the official listing of all his creations and the first for a Filipino artist, was also launched this month at the Prado.

Not surprisingly, Zóbel’s exceptional mind continues to resonate with a new generation of art enthusiasts. The exhibition has received unanimous praise from art critics and has attracted over 65,000 visitors in its run to date. It is, after all, one indelible mark of a great artist: the ability to reach across a continuum of time and space, to be as relevant today as they were almost a century ago. It is, says Professor Pereda, that unique gift “to make the impossible beautiful.”

Images courtesy of Ayala Museum​