THE LIBERATION OF H.R. OCAMPO

Words failed Hernando R. Ocampo when he needed them most.

- AA PATAWARAN

It still unsettles me to think of a man known for color once trusting only words. It is chilling to imagine a future National Artist entering the New Bilibid Prison in 1945 and discovering that the language he loved had abandoned him at the exact moment he needed it. He had been accused of collaboration for working as a scriptwriter and censor under the Japanese. He insisted it was cover for intelligence work with legendary American guerrilla leader Colonel Hugh Straughn, but the Americans were not convinced. Silence filled the cell, as did the imperative to make something out of nothing.

I thought of that stillness at the preview dinner at León Gallery. It was a collaboration with the premium Iberian roasting house Txoko Asador that turned the showroom into a kind of private supper club where the light fell just right on the walls and made every painting look like it might move if you blinked. The turbot arrived soft and bright with capers. The steak from Galicia was perfectly medium rare, a shade of pink that could have claimed my full attention. Yet I kept rising from the table, drifting toward the walls, my Tempranillo moving with me like a shadow.

The paintings took over.

The gallery had become a room suspended between centuries. Juan Luna’s “La Infancia de la Naturaleza” loomed with a dark 19th-century gravity while Jigger Cruz threw the present into the air with a restless insistence that made you feel alive. A nearby display held a rare first edition of Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere paired with its sequel El Filibusterismo, and a tiny poetry book for Leonor Rivera, a whisper of longing beside revolution.