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A leading member of the pre-war Thirteen Moderns, and referred to by art historians as a vanguard of the Neo-Realists, a group that sought to depict their inner vision of experience and the lived environment by harnessing the formal elements of art to create new realities, Hernando Ruiz (better known by the acronym 'H.R.') Ocampo began work as a journalist, and also received acclaim for his poetry, before achieving renown as a visual artist. Ocampo is best known as a pioneer of Philippine non-objective art, breaking down images to their most basic forms before conjoining these in puzzle-shaped aggrupations that reverberate through the maestro's highly intuitive use of line, color, texture, and tone. Pagoda is arguably one of Ocampo's most important paintings, if not one of his best known. Here the clustered red and ochre biomorphs seem to pulsate and undulate as their piled-up forms - now unified visually as a tiered, towering mass - appear to shift and move upward as if to capture the very essence of a place of worship where one can achieve spirituality and enlightenment. This painting, which used to be in the collection of the family of a Philippine filmmaker, appeared in several scenes near the conclusion of the award-winning 1983 film Kislap sa Dilim