Anita Magsaysay-Ho is a Philippine painter central to histories of Southeast Asian modernism, most known for her ennobling scenes of working Filipina women. Self-Portrait (1944) views the act of painting as an open-ended process of emergence. In keeping with her fellow subjects, Magsaysay-Ho renders herself at work with easel nearby and tools primed for use. Her handling of paint—smeared, streaked, and often appearing to spill beyond flatness and form—results in varying effect, gesturing to a meta-commentary that never fully resolves itself. The figure on the canvas appears hazy, nearly inchoate, while the artist’s own visage is highly refined and luminous. Her loosely rendered jacket, however, seems to blur into the larger composition – akin to her palette that is at once painting’s ground and this artwork’s foreground. Even the white rag that she holds, smudged in black, veers between paint-as-itself and painting-as-representation. This self-reflexive portrait thus stages an ongoing, co-constitutive moment of creation, informed deeply by artist’s own Filipina identity and her lifelong devotion to depicting others like herself.
This is the first time the work of Anita Magsaysay-Ho is presented at Biennale Arte.
—C J Salapare
