Since 1994, Malang has celebrated his birthday with a major exhibition of paintings corresponding to his age. He only met his quota last year by revisiting old, unfinished compositions. This year, he says that it is probably the last year he would attempt the feat of painting one composition to match every year of his life. The commitment to detail, design, and color remains the signature of his works.

Malang at 80 champions not only the man behind the canvas, but more so his determination to keep painting amid the challenges he faces every day, whether it is something that concerns his health or an aesthetic matter that forces him to proceed deliberately. Malang at Eighty, his birthday exhibition, is on view at the Art Center in SM Megamall until February 5.

His only significant art training were drawing lessons from the lanscapist Teodoro Buenaventura, a contemporary of Amorsolo when he was nine years old growing up in old Manila’s downtown district of Sta. Cruz. Most of what he now knows came from learning it on his own and occasionally asking the advice of his peers.

Dropping out of UP’s College of fine arts after three months, Malang considers his work as an illustrator and later as an editorial artist for the Manila Chronicle, the equivalent of a college education. He was exposed to the Ermita Neo Realists, led by Hernando Ocampo, then editor of the Chronicle’s Sunday Magazine.

"I took in all those things I heard and saw and read that I felt were good for me, and what I wanted to do," says Malang. "Just to master one subject or one medium can take a lifetime. He is most at ease with gouache and also worked hard in recent years to be comfortable using oil. Each of his subjects, from women to barung-barong, from landscapes to still life, is carefully and uniquely rendered. To contemporary Arturo Rogerio Luz, every Malang painting is a "visual feast saturating the canvas and filling the senses, as though celebrating the very act of painting."

"Don’t ever think it will come to you overnight," says Malang on the mastery by which he commands his brush. "Excellence comes little by little – so you paint and paint until you drop." "Some of the most color irradiated paintings in the history of Philippine Art," says Cid Reyes describing his works. " There is no color he avoids, no hue or shade he cannot orchestrate in his palette.

Malang at Eighty is organized by West Gallery in cooperation with SM Megamall