Business and art have long moved in quiet tandem. Jiro Yoshihara, once involved in Japan’s food oils trade, later reshaped modern Japanese art through the Gutai movement. Oliver Preston, a former director at Lehman Brothers, now channels life’s absurdities into vivid cartoons. Both show that structure and creativity do not compete but strengthen one another.
Erich Lingad moves along the same convergence. A businessman leading logistics and freight ventures such as Move It, he brings to his art the same principles that guide his enterprises: structure, rhythm, and order. A graduate of De La Salle University in industrial management engineering and mechanical engineering, he paints with an engineer’s eye, balancing precision with imagination.
His paintings echo the pulse of business yet distill them into visual simplicity. Instead of trucks and cargo crossing distances, line, color, and form travel across canvas. Each piece feels deliberate yet open, rooted in a love for geometry and animated by a quiet search for connection.
Two of his paintings, Bird Outside Our Window and Mother and Child, unfold this sensibility with care. Built from interlocking triangles, each piece moves with its own rhythm while moving toward a larger unity. In one, a bird rests among bamboo stalks, its presence an echo of nature’s calm; in the other, a mother embraces her child close, the geometry tempered by tenderness.
For him, the triangle speaks of more than structure. It reflects unity, stability, and connection. Just as the three sides of a triangle support one another; families, communities, and nations grow stronger when each part holds its place. His paintings offer a meditation on interdependence, where strength is found not in rigidity but in relationship.
Lingad’s approach recalls the Bauhaus movement’s pursuit of seamless form and function. There are traces of Paul Klee’s lyrical geometries and Piet Mondrian’s disciplined abstractions. Yet his works remain rooted in the living world: disciplined but humane, precise yet breathing.
Bird Outside Our Window moves in steady greens and blues, a quiet meditation on resilience and presence. Mother and Child glows with reds and maroons, grounding themes of care and belonging within the forgiving structure of the triangle. Though exact in construction, the paintings resist coldness. Their rhythm suggests quiet breathing; of life moving within carefully drawn spaces.
In Lingad’s art, order and imagination meet to build not just structure but meaning.
