New Gallery
an angry social realist continues to rage by emmanuel torres philippine star 2000
Just as you were asking if Social Realism today is dying or dead - in fact, plans to reprise some of the best from the martial-law era in a forthcoming group show may be a sign of its demise - two of its mainstays have been making waves anew in recent weeks. Antipas Delotavo (b.1954) romped away with a grand prize in Philip Morris’s Philippine Art Awards 2000, which closed Sept. 30 at the Metropolitan Museum, even as Nunelucio Alvarado (b.1950) was set to launch a major solo show of new and recent paintings in the same venue the following week (through Oct. 31).
Both, incidentally, represent the extreme ends of the SR scale. While Delotavo respects the traditional rendering of the human figure and remains underwhelming in his social comment, Alvarado overpowers by radical means, re-forming and transforming natural appearance to a surreal degree to match the violence of his themes.
Based in the island province of Negros (hence the name of his SR group, the Black Artists of Asia), Alvarado has never ceased bearing witness to social injustice and human-rights violations. As the Met show attests, he has continued to do so well into the ’90s when his craft of sullen art reached a pinnacle of eloquence seldom seen hereabouts. What’s more, the intensity of his protest art continues to be that of an angry young man in the face of issues not having changed in three post-Marcos governments. Going by his latest perceptions of the marginalized migrant, or sakada, peasant masses in his home province, their sorrows under a neo-feudal system seem to have taken a turn for the worse. The title of his new show, Tagimatá (Ilonggo for "Eyesore"), hardly does justice to their discontent.
Over the years, he has developed a symbolic/surreal imagery built around the sugarcane, the crop which serves as both source of livelihood and scourge of the peasant class. The cane, not as recognizably obvious as before, is treated more subtly, more abstractly. It is cut up to comprise a bed of sharpened stakes in his most gut-wrenching work to date - the show’s centerpiece, Fuerza [Force], a mural measuring 12 x 18 feet - on which the son of a sakada couple, bound by his own serpentine umbilical cord, lies on a bedrock of red nails. You can tick off the symbolic specifics of victimization all over this mural: pincer-like hands grabbing the mother’s breasts, dagger and bullet striking the father’s shoulders, the crimson-veined fists of both parents who resemble sphinxes clutching green reptiles signifying their master’s greed. In one corner, the urban high-rises evoke a history of capitalist culture thriving on the backs of the poor.
Alvarado’s "eyesores" come across with their strongly centered com-position, dynamic distortion, in-cisive drawing - and an obsession with pairs of images arranged in symmetrical balance. The figures are crisply articulated with the simplicity of playing-card characters. Sleek, tubby bodies buffed to a metallic sheen, long, tapering tongues, and alligators with open mouths are among the images defining the demonic aspects of his corrosive wit and black humor more than ever before. Particularly hallucinatory are those in which the bestial and the human fuse, as in a reptile morphing into a man’s hand. Colors in their maximum intensities (aggressive reds, biting blues), more emotive than descriptive, correlate with the agitated forms in the never-ending struggle of the peasants against their entrapment. Even as his canvases echo with street cries of "Neocolonialism! Imperialism!" once heard in the Marcos era, Alvarado creates a world of his own with signs and symbols that help you distinguish the oppressed from the oppressor with relative ease, as in a zarzuela, though his cueing technique occasionally tends toward the formulaic, like the wide gator smiles identifying the avaricious and the lecherous.
Bulag [Blind] encompasses virtually all the terms of his visual vocabulary: cane crosses, nails, spikes, bullets, knives and arrowheads, wide-open, saucer eyes, skulls, claw hands and tongues hanging out; snakes, crocodiles, dogs. Center of interest is a capitalist couple looking sinister in dark shades - a jewel-bedecked socialite wearing an upside-down crucifix and carrying a handbag, beside her mustachioed spouse with a walking stick made of (what else?) cane stuck into the mouth of a wretched beggar crouching beneath him. Allusion to neocolonial mentality in cahoots with pious hypocrisy sticks out in the lurid caricature this painting is.
Many of his symbols derive from Christian iconography, with ingenious variations of his own. Gomburza sa Hacienda presents a peasant nailed by cane spikes to an invisible cross, iron thorns crowning his cadaverous head, and eyes glaring blankly like a spook’s in a world of cut cane set against a bloody sky.
The plight of the sakada takes a heavy toll on children. In Crossing, a child is nailed to a cane cross with a symbol of greed, the crocodile, beneath it, and a phantom skull filling out the entire background. The same emaciated child is carried by its mother, standing erect and tearless, in Blue Baby, a parody of the pieta icon. Most memorably, an infant in Dagit snatched by an abstract bird of prey represented by a circle of feathers is as much a victim of feudal capitalism as its parents who sit passively at the center of the circle with coins for eyes and mouths taped by the dollars of that wicked hawk, Uncle Sam - as if the U.S. military bases had left the country only to be replaced by another greater monster responsible for worsening mass poverty: globalization.
Alvarado’s Social Realism is not confined to the woes of the peasantry; it includes a whole slew of other sociopolitical concerns outside the world of the hacienda. Aswang refers to the pallor of all-night mahjongg players; "Murto" to the ghost employees of provincial government who materialize only on each payday. Several others refer to drug and nicotine addiction, prostitution, military abuses.
By themselves, these works are arguably less successful than those that have to do with martyrdom in the fields of bad dreams. The issue of corruption in high places is clearly effective in Brown Envelope, with its calendar Christ and a portrait of President Estrada hanging behind a faceless authority figure in barong about to receive a bribe under the table. Not so the meaning of a burning rubber sandal in Ebidensia, which becomes a piece of evidence of a brutal "salvaging" only when seen in the context of other works depicting militarization.
Compared to his evocatively complex hacienda paintings, his satirical purview of other ills besetting Philippine society may strike some viewers as over the edge. Bordering on the gauche is a bordello transaction in Mama Sang, where the fat lady in Bulag reappears as a madam consorting with a roly-poly Uncle Sam and pointing to the silver coin he flaunts. The images beneath them may be a bit explicit rather than suggestive - copulating canines, phallic cigar, condom sucking in a figure - but these emblematic "footnotes" are downsized rather than played up.
Satire is more imaginatively served in Ang Mahal nga Hari [Beloved King], a mutation of an overlord in boots, arms upraised in the shape of a heart which, in turn, encloses an oversized bullet, while two minions kneel before him with hypodermic syringes hanging over their heads. What it clearly indicates: narcotic power as instant fix to misery and potential rebellion.
In Philippine Delicacy, plump, nubile women in the flesh trade are laid out like sticks of barbecue with the central figure standing vertically across them. A tiny Philippine flag stuck on her nipple, not to mention a Valentine-heart patch covering her private parts, is typical Alvarado overkill. In his feminist mode, though, I can’t shake off the odd feeling that the artist has his tongue in his cheek, more in collusion with, rather than against, macho attitudes toward the fairer sex. A case in point is All the Way, spotlighting a stripper on a table before a horny, all-male audience. Of incidental interest in this and some other canvases is the partial use of a literal approach - something new in Alvarado’s art - in recreating money, an ID card, a calendar picture of Christ.
Although the agony and the rage remain as the constants of its vision, Tagimatá eschews sensationalism by his precise, astringent stylization of figure and scene. The controlled energy that informs his imagery and thematic purpose is enough to pack a retinal wallop to stop you in your tracks.
As bonus, Alvarado is also showing eight paintings from his Philippine Centennial show of 1998 in a separate space at the Met, just as potent in concept and form as the 21 Tagimatá oils. All together, they represent a consistently linear chain of development without a weak link in it.
Given the magnitude of artistic effort involved, and the high cost of its production on the part of Hiraya Gallery, which organized it, it’s a shame that Alvarado’s most compelling achievement to date should run for only three weeks when it clearly deserves a longer engagement of, say, three months so more visitors can see it. After all, how often does something of this caliber come to the Met? Let me say this in no uncertain terms: his is the most visually and mentally gripping display of creative intelligence I’ve seen in decades - and a giant step that takes Alvarado closer to greatness.