An artist’s right to self-fulfillment Tribal Images on Ice
An artist’s right to self-fulfillment
Tribal Images on Ice
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, August 26, 1987
THE romantic lure of the artist as frontiersman has always been difficult to resist. Early in this century, the renowned German painter Winold Reiss — fascinated by boyhood stories he had read about the great Indian tribes of the American Northwest — ventured forth as a young man to live the remainder of his life among these tribes, devoting himself to recording their hitherto-unknown cultural facets with the devotion of an anthropologist. The Indians were said to have given Reiss the name “Beaver Child”, eventually looking to him as one of their own. When the artist died in 1953, his ashes were scattered over the ancestral Blackfoot lands as was customary for revered tribal sons.
In similar fashion, the multi-awarded Filipino printmaker Fil Delacruz achieved recognition early in his career by bringing us face to face with our own tragically-neglected cultural minorities — a noble undertaking made all the more significant by our rekindled interest in the Filipino’s ethnic roots. With his masterful mezzotints or rich monochromatic tones, Delacruz found a compelling visual poetry in the highland Manobos of Mindanao that was both unprecedented and unexcelled. To be sure, if Delacruz were to disappear today without a trace, neither his reputation as a printmaker nor the importance of his work in the tribal genre would in any way be diminished.
Only the artist himself could have brought about a diminution of his own lofty stature. And in his last three exhibitions at least, Fil Delacruz has seemed to deliberately embrace the course of self-destruction and renewal.
It is hardly a secret that an increasing number of Delacruz’s contemporaries have found his painterly excursions into surrealism to be at best premature and ill-advised. In his 1986 exhibitions at the CCP Small Gallery and at the Finale Art File in Makati, Delacruz had already begun to cast his patented Manobo tribesmen in dream-like sequences laden with erotic undertones, even while subjecting them to double-imaging and wholesale lap-dissolves of a decidedly cinematic persuasion. And in this, his most recent outing at the Ayala Museum’s Gallery III, the artist has virtually dispensed with his well-loved Manobo themes altogether, trading exotic tribal mysticism for his own curious brand of popular psychology.
We all know that transitional phases can be painfully awkward, and that the embarrassment of those who trip and fall in public can only heighten the discomfort of passers-by. Thus, it must have distressed his viewers no end to watch Delacruz fumble with figuration and technique, once hallmarks of his celebrated mezzotints. And beyond the realm of appearances, the exhibition fails to inspire precisely because the artist falls far short of the goals he has set for himself.
But although we can only regret Delacruz’s current failings, we should be no less supportive of an artist’s compulsion to explore new ground. It is good to remember that when Picasso took his bold leap into Cubism, his closest friends were unanimous in thinking him mad. The comparison here may be downright fanciful, but it is exceedingly apt. And while Delacruz’s cocoon may be dishearteningly transparent, we can continue to hope that he may yet emerge from his metamorphosis in glory.
Photo, courtesy of Ayala Museum
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “An artist’s right to self-fulfillment Tribal Images on Ice” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, August 26, 1987
