On view at the Main Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines until Jan. 7 is “Edades: From Freedom to Fruition” (alluding to the “freedom from the old” and “fruition or products”), an extensive exhibition of old paintings and memorabilia and exhibition notes that walk through the life and works of Victorio Edades (1895-1985) like a life-size 3D coffee-table book.

The show is a biographical sketch that traces Edades’ early beginnings from the town of Bolosan, Pangasinan, at the turn of the 19th century; his work and studies abroad; his American wife and daughter; his dip into the field of architecture; his handwritten notes and letters about art… all the way to the products of his life’s work as educator at University of Santo Tomas, where, in the ’30s, he helped organize the Department of Architecture and put up the School of Fine Arts. - INQ.net
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The approach to this exhibit is to create a visual identity that is based and pulled out from the painter’s work. It’s important to emphasize the main featured painting and draw out the visual vocabulary from there. Edades was integral to institutionalizing modernism in the Philippines and the choice of typography and how that cascaded in all of the collaterals should reflect that. The play of serif against his works examines the play on how his work questioned the convention and introduced this new movement to the Philippines in the 50s.