Prudencio Lamarroza

Prudencio Villamor Lamarroza was born on July 24, 1946 to Eugenio Lamarroza, and Eladia Leal, in the barrio of Ambalayat in Tagudin, a second class municipality in the province of locos Sur, in northern Philippines. Barrio Ambalayat lies between two rivers, the Amburayan and the Chico. Amburayan river was itself the merging of what were called Carayan Dakel (Big River) and Carayan Basit (Little River).

In time the two rivers, Amburayan and Chico, will flow ceaselessly in the currents of Lamarroza's art. Lamarroza as a child never heard the lofty word "ecology" but in time Amburayan emphatically manifested its expressive power in the heart and mind of the artist. A sanctuary of nature, Amburayan also opened up the child's wondering eyes to the delights and marvels of a multitude of colors revealed in its landscapes.

In 1975, a 35-year old Filipino artist, presented a solo exhibition already his sixth - of his latest works bearing the unfamiliar title "Amburayan." To most viewers, the term was a cipher, a puzzle, a mystery. What intrigued the art audience, and the media was the very title of the show. "Amburayan" had an exotic ring, the sound of syllables foreign at least to a Manila audience, a strangeness, thus alien to Tagalog ears.

In the course of several decades' work, Lamarroza has usurped almost every genre: representational figuration, abstraction, impressionism, minimalism, op, pop, surrealism, digital, computer art, photography, installation. And in each of these, he has found resolution in his calculated embrace of each; on the surface discontinuous but taken altogether: generative, reflective, transformative.

Exposed to the art trends of succeeding decades since the Sixties, Lamarroza's mind - as a deliberate aesthetic choice - thrives in free-association, conscious of all the latent implications and significances that he allows to infiltrate the sacrosanct spaces of the Amburayan landscape. Influences from the various isms converge in a cohesive configuration. Lamarroza is stimulated at every turn - ever the perpetual art student who refuses to isolate himself from the intersecting currents of the art world. We are not here talking of physical isolation, which as we have already seen, he ardently seeks almost as a sine qua non for his creative existence, where he can burrow deep into his unconscious, where he can encounter the magical. Rather, we speak here of Lamarroza's need to be ever aware of the discourses and dynamics that swirl incessantly in the world of art. In this regard, Lamarroza's mind is always a charged field of ideas and insights.