HANS BRUMANN INSPIRES CREATIVITY AT GLOBE
Iam greatly inspired by nature as well as everyday things. See, inspiration comes from all things around you – if you have the eye to see it,” says Manila-based Swiss artist Hans Brumann.
Hans’ “Variations in Mother of Pearl,” an exhibition showcasing a series of sculptures completed over the course of a decade, is on view at the Globe Art Gallery until Sept. 1.
“Innovation is at the heart of our survival at this point in an industry like ours, always threatened as our main business of call and text is going down and we have to find many more uses for our data service,” says Globe president and chief executive officer Ernest Cu. “This promotes worklife balance. A lot of employees just come down here to look at the art and relax and that stimulates their minds creatively. Globe does not like to do what’s been done before. We like to blaze a trail in the industry.”
Hans, too, is all about doing things that haven’t been done before. As a goldsmith and jeweler, he combines Mother of Pearl with found objects and gems and precious metals, fashioning statement pieces in the likeness of nature’s beauty. As a visual artist, he, too, has worked with Mother of pearl sourced from Mindanao over the last 20 years, starting out with crucifixes, including the one he has in his bedroom.
The sea meets the earth in Hans’ abstraction of everyday life. He juxtaposes Mother of Pearl, whether from Mindanao or Tahiti, with Filipino hard wood (“I use it because no worms can go in,” he says) but pieces from 2015 onwards show him experimenting with the malleability and versatility of stainless steel, too.
“Jewelry is miniature architecture, sculptures are jewelry for a space,” he says in describing the two.
Some pieces are more jewel-like than others, like the centerpiece “Variations,” with its layers of Pinctada maxima, kamagong, and Tahitian black lip Mother of Pearl, and “Window,” made of over 400 pieces of Tahitian black lip mother of pearl and Mindanao Mother of Pearl.
There are more windows in the series. “Barong Barong” combines mother of pearl and hardwood with pebbles, with the mother of pearl set to resemble clouds, done to call to mind traditional sliding capiz windows that are now mostly only seen in provincial ancestral homes, symbolizing a simpler life. “Interlock” is a three-dimensional Mother of Pearl frame with a
kamagong and molave base. Hans doesn’t sculpt the pieces himself, turning over his sketches to three artisans who work directly under him with his guidance and instruction. Another love of his is watercolor painting, which he admits, “is very hard, I have to be very good at it.” Thus, some pieces appear to be like pictures. He dedicates a sapin-sapin arrangement of Mother of Pearl with molave, kamagong, narra, and yakal called “Bali” to the national artist J. Elizalde Navarro, whom he looks up to. In “Thousand Islands,” he combines
narra, molave, and tiger kamagong in curvilinear strips to recreate a vista of lush mountains, as though you were looking at it from the sea or from above on a plane through a film of clouds. The glistening waters are in Mindanao Mother of Pearl.
We also see Hans as playful and whimsical in “Lotti,” a cartoon-like rendering of his and his wife Maria’s beloved pet cat in stainless steel, painted black. In the same material, he captures fragility with the sturdy material in “Falling leaves” – if you can see it.
He says of his abstraction, “It was a tree. But I want you to look for the tree.”
Hans’ longtime lunch buddy and Hiraya Gallery founder and artistic director Didi Dee says, “Hans likes to think he’s very Filipino because he has lived here for 50 years and now has a dual citizenship, but because he’s born and grew up Swiss, there is a distinct Swiss sensibility of elegance in his work. His work may be abstract, but there is no more, no less. Only clean lines. Because of that, there is clarity.”
Ernest singles out “The Family” as the piece which resonates the most with him, himself a father of two and of a corporation so essential to the daily lives of millions of Filipinos. In “The Family,” Hans uses its three dimensional quality to reveal the father’s significance through the sittings of the sculptural figures. The father stands behind the mother and child not as an imposing figure but as a supportive one, allowing his offspring to shine without being too far behind, always right there for support. Indeed, Hans’ abstraction not only prods one to think of ideas beyond the usual, but also to look within for what truly matters.
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Variations of Mother of Pearl will be on view at Globe Art Gallery, B1, Globe Tower, Bonifacio Global City until Sept. 1.