In the 1950s, just as modernism was starting to take root in the Philippine art scene, across the sea at the Ivy League Yale School of Fine Arts in Connecticut, Constancio Bernardo was completing his Opus No. 1. It was the centerpiece of his eventual master’s thesis exhibition, Perpetual Motion, which he presented in 1955, and is considered to be a magnum opus of Bernardo’s abstraction–a magenta canvas animated by recessing lines and shadows that create illusions of depth. The story goes that his mentor, the renowned abstract painter and theorist Josef Albers, sat for hours studying the painting and told Bernardo, “You are not my student; you are my peer.”

When Bernardo returned to Manila after studying at Yale, his radical shift to abstract art did not sit well with his mentor, none other than National Artist Fernando Amorsolo. Bernardo was his protégé, with a skill likened to the highly celebrated painter himself. Bernardo was supposedly continuing their realist traditions in genre painting, not deviating from it. Regardless of his mentor’s disapproval, Bernardo had already converted from figurative painting to geometric abstraction. He saw that there was more to just following the physical world and that due attention must also be given to how the mind sees the world. He saw abstraction as poetry and as a spiritual awakening.