Nena Saguil moved from the Philippines to Paris where she continued to produce her signature works of cellular-looking objects. Her works are filled with orbs, spheres, circles, mandalas, cells, and moons all floating around the canvas---her very own interpretation of the cosmos.

Parisienne Nena Saguil, one of the last of the revered Filipino modern artist-expatriates, wove a cosmos of forms in pen and ink, mixed media and oil.

At first some of her work appears to be cross-section explorations of plant parts or unicellular organisms under the scrutiny of a microscope. The images later transform into the organs of the elements, the fiber of the universe: dots, bubbles vortices, rays all delicately drawn to create the vital system of order, of nature congealing in imaginative schemes, in the shape of ecology.

Although Saguil, who died in 1994, worked in the abstract mode, her other works tell us that she had other concerns as well. Two 1950 works show the artist's range of figurative reportoire as she portrays an enlarged hymen and a woman cleaning a toilet bowl splattered with human waste. These two paintings sustain the vitality of Saguil's oeuvre, which was the focus of renewed attention in September 1995 at the Lopez Memorial Museum and was subjected for further scrutiny at a major exhibit at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1997.

Saguil's world, indeed, is all her own and ours as well.

Source:
"Nena Saguil", www.artfinding.com


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