An Art Critic's Way of Seeing
An Art Critic's Way of Seeing
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, August 02, 1986
The view from without and within
LIKE most foreign artists residing and exhibiting in this country, Renee Swanberg Croghan is the all-too-fortunate citizen of at least two worlds simultaneously. She is a member of the local diplomatic community by virtue of her marriage to a US Embassy official, and her major exhibition of paintings in 1985 was presented with resounding fanfare at the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center (TJCC), presumably under the auspices of the United States Information Service (USIS). While Mrs. Croghan has never pretended to be an artist of international stature, the TJCC is not exactly a venue receptive to the work of young upstarts, almost exclusively devoting its facilities here to renowned American artists or to their occasional brown brothers currently making good on the American Dream. And glittery art debuts being devastatingly irresistable to the local artworld, Mrs. Croghan's reputation in this country has become established virtually overnight, and certainly far in excess of any small reputation she might have enjoyed at home.
It is both easy and difficult, therefore, to readily dismiss Mrs. Croghan as just another imported lightweight, albeit not the kind that exhibits handicrafts and oriental brushwork in five-star hotels. Undoubtedly, her current exhibition of mixed-media paperworks at the Finale Art File in Makati is as initially perplexing as the artist herself, surrounded as it is by the pervading aura of her previous appearance and by her sporadic excursions into the Philippine landscape both from without and within.
Again, like many western expatriates attempting to depict the Orient of the senses, Mrs. Croghan's "drawings" fall curiously into that grey space between the mystic symbolism of Gauguin and the rice-wine romanticism of Buck and Maugham. Local color and motifs have always appeared to the fair of skin and eye as rather hot and furious, if not fiercely garish, quite often border on the and their depictions of our everyday surroundings do hallucinatory. Too much sun and nitpicking can do that to the tenderfoot oriental frontiersman, and in Mrs. Croghan's graphic notations are marked traces of impending sunstroke.
Nevertheless, our surroundings lend themselves well enough to the artist's new expressionism, what with its seeming abundance of snarling beasts and bizarre religiosity. The things we rightly or wrongly take for granted are very nearly comical in Mrs. Croghan's transcriptions of the world we live in, drawn as they are from a visual source whose "mysteries" escape her understanding and are therefore perceived and recorded like extraterrestial debris.
Mrs. Croghan is much more outstanding in her freeform renditions derived mostly from her own innermost references. In these the beginnings of a personal mythology closest to her heart and mind are the powerful stirrings of a creative consciousness that can aspire to greater heights. As for her tentative explorations into her own perception of the Philippine adventure, Renee Swanberg Croghan translates only into a faltering shorthand. But she will probably have a great many tall tales to tell at fireside chats for a long, long time to come.
Blood and sugar
THE recent paintings of Nunelucio Alvarado are the other side to the American Pop Art of the 60’s. Consumerism and mass-media advertising may well be the monster of influence that it is in America, but the blood of our children goes into every can of zesty tomato paste. And that’s infinitely more chilling.
If Nunelucio Alvarado’s gnome-like sakadas are all too disturbing, the reality they depict can only be deadly. This is precisely the part glossed over in television commercials, and that part that Alvarado knows only too well. For every sweetened cup on the white man’s table carries the stench of greed and oppression. And there are no jingles for dead children.
Do not look Alvarado in the eye, for you will see what he sees and the pain might overwhelm you. Death is an everyday happenstance among the hungry, but it is no less excruciating. There is no pomp and pageantry, no marching bands and eulogies, and hardly any banter and disbelief for the dead among the dying. The cries are stifled in the night, and those who succumb first are wrapped in soiled bundles and thrust into the earth like dogs. They also grieve who are not heard.
Do not look Alvarado’s pictures in the eye, for you will see what he sees and the anger might terrify you. The same blade that threshes the cane may haunt you in your sleep, poised to strike at your indifference. Feel then the cold steel that is the brown man’s tongue when all else is deaf. Feel then the dying of the sun and the black eternity of the Visayan night. They also bleed who are not seen.
In this exhibition of his recent paintings at the Galerie Andrea in Intramuros, the artist Nunelucio Alvarado emerges as by far the most eloquent voice in Philippine Social Realism today. Had he been less than so, he might have spared us the horror of realization. They also hunger who are not counted.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “An Art Critic’s Way of Seeing” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, August 02, 1986
