The fire

From model to actress, from theatre to film screen and to television, from environmentalist to artist, Chinchin Gutierrez finds herself at home in all these roles. She has also suffered tragedy in media as well as in real life. Her family house burned down 3 years ago in a night time fire that gave no warning, just devastated everything. This was followed a few weeks later by the death of her mother, ailing and bedridden for over a year. Such double tragedy often signals a new start.


Neither event has deterred her from her higher goals, a clean earth free from pollution, and a fulfilled humanity, each person expressing his or her talents to serve others. These now find expression in her recent paintings on the theme Altars of Love, shown at the Soufflé, Top of the Citi, Citibank Towers, Makati 6 to 14 January 2010.

Almost 40 years ago, before Chinchin was born, her mother, Cecilia Arnaldo Gutierrez, also presented an exhibit of paintings on themes inspired by the French theologian writer, Teillhard de Chardin, S.J. These were a set of highly abstract art made meaningful through the common sense writings of the Jesuit theologian. He is known most for his writings, Building the Earth and the Phenomenon of Man. He builds a human based theology on a spiritually investigated anthropology.

"The phrase 'Sense of the Earth' should be understood to mean the passionate concern for our common destiny which draws the thinking part of life ever further onward. The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistible pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion.”

Cecilia’s art forms seemed inspired by the theta series of Fernando Zobel, extant and famous from the sixties. Except for those paintings obtained during the exhibition, all of Cecilia’s other paintings are now burnt.

Does the phoenix really rise from the fire?

Chinchin’s artworks are also abstracts, but more prayer- based, specifically on the prayer attributed to Ignatius, the Anima Christi. “In thy wounds hide me,” a deep brown square with an eternally penetrating spiral of shallowly deepening yellow beginning nowhere, ending nowhere. But hide me. The exposure, the vulnerability, the pain, the openness to being wounded, a wound itself. But, hide me.

In “Immaculate Heart,” one sees the bloody spray of an aorta against a jungle of dark green, but no heart! Can your eye find a young girl child with outstretched arms seeking to embrace a baby boy? Is that baby boy still in a womb? Or is it grown up? Is it, that this child girl and this boy form two lobes of a swished white heart? Does one really see this, or does the artist will you to form it for yourself?

Not to be compared with other art exhibits, Chinchin’s tableaux are highly personal, deeply expressive. One need not be a theologian to appreciate them. A high school drop-out helped me form these interpretations.

In Chardin’s words, “It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . May it not be that, tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, [humanity] will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?"