Social Realists on Parade [conclusion]
Social Realists on Parade [conclusion]
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, February 14, 1987
PERHAPS never before since the dawning of this century has a pre-occupation with socio-political dynamics so obviously dominated our visual arts. The ongoing exhibition of Social Realist paintings at the CCP Main Gallery is some indication of the premium our cultural enforcers have placed on art rooted in the proletarian struggle. This pick of the pack, so to speak, has been billed as the sociopolitical show of shows, a cultural milestone. It quite honestly isn’t.
Sadly missing from the exhibit, for instance, are the paintings of Nunelucio Alvarado, that wandering barefoot Negrense whose chilling portrayals of sugarcane plantation workers are easily among the most outstanding examples of the Social Realist genre. There are others whose conspicuous absence may have implications over and above a curatorial context, hinting perhaps that the CCP has not been entirely reconciled with its staunchest critics.
Orlando Castillo is something like the Grand Old Patriarch of local socio-political art. His work here is virtual stock-in-trade, though more historically significant than outstanding. You don’t cut cheese with a rare family heirloom, and certainly, the sharpest blades are dulled with time.
I suspect that Pablo Baens Santos would be a more effective painter of socio-political commentary if he weren’t so darned repetitious. His south-of-the-border approach to stoic figuration, rooted in plebian machismo and latino-revolutionary bravura, is almost painted by numbers — a much-reworked iconography of armed struggle that may even now be a kind-of corporate symbol for the revenge of the masses. His men at arms are invariably nameless, faceless, often passionately insensitive — prototyp ego cogs in an incessent proletarian war machine charging forth with grit teeth and clenched fists. With this artist, you need see only one to see them all, and there are more than enough in this collection alone.
Edgar T. Fernandez has seen better days than these, his basic figuration sadly wanting, and his dramatically pensive scenarios perhaps a little too contrived in their sincere effort to glorify the myth of the grassroots warrior and his dream of a better tomorrow. Fernandez seems to have temporarily lost his way, at least partially because of his current predilection for grandiose symbolism and impassioned melodrama.
Leonilo Doloricon’s two small uninspired canvases are more notable for the damage they inflict on the exhibition as a whole than for any little significance they might have had on their own.
Within the explicit context of this exhibition, at least half of Jose Tence Ruiz’s work is thematically ambiguous, even obscure. His large murky oil painting of an animal carcass split open and drip-dried on meathooks looks more like a case for the SPCA than it does meaningful social commentary. This may well be in allusion to the exploitative local flesh trade (or "brown meat market", as the title "ALIBANGBANG" seems to imply), but a veteran visual commentator like Ruiz should by now have learned to tell the difference between subtlety and inanity. To be sure, this and other works need some fancy guesswork to get across.
On the other hand, Ruiz’s deeply disturbing "MGA NAG-NINONG KAY NENENG" is a far more successful piece on the same theme for all its striking similarity to the English painter Francis Bacon — featuring a hapless a-go-go dancer being eyeballed by a pair of beer-guzzling dirty old men. Verve is obviously the one thing this artist does not lack. His sculptural mock-up of a dark interrogation chamber, complete with a generously endowed victim strapped to a chair, is fiendish enough to scare the living daylights out of the viewer, or at least to keep him out of politics and away from electrical sockets. But it is in the composite manner of assemblage that Tence Ruiz has always excelled, perhaps even more than in editorial cartooning, and his "KALENDARYO" would be among the best works on exhibit if we could only figure out what it was doing here in the first place.
Imelda Cajipe-Endaya is still another artist whose extensive work in the collage of found objects literally rises head and shoulders above her peers. Her participation here gives the show all the textural richness and material innovation it would otherwise have badly needed. All fire and no imagination makes Social Realism a dull state of affairs at times, and Cajipe-Endaya is a wonderfully imaginative painter if not necessarily the most eloquent commentator on current events. While her monumental canvases of recent vintage are truly magnificent in their wholesale use of indigenous materials and other cultural debris, her earlier (and more traditional) works like "BUHAY AY ARTISTA KOMIKS" (1981) are diluted political slapstick at its worst — work she would have done better to have left at home and unnoticed.
Political slapstick is precisely the meat to the visual vernacular of Charlie Co, an artist whose gross irreverence is matched only by his penchant for cheap tricks and a dimestore imagery. Co's politico-surreal nightmares are accomplished in a style as crude as jailhouse banter and about as cerebral as a roadside latrine. This artist would probably do best spray-painting on tenement walls, and at any rate, hardly belongs in the context of any self-respecting gallery of fine art.
In his two intensely-moving mural-sized works "PIETA" and "LUCAS", Antipas "Biboy" Delotavo emerges from years of mild-mannered banality as, finally, a major voice in recent local contemporary art. Delotavo’s mastery of means is put to good use in circumventing the pitfalls of heartrending imagery — so potentially ludicrous in the hands of the inept — succeeding not once, but twice, in a remarkable display of compositional and thematic brilliance. The women who grieve for the fallen brave, they who bear the cruelest scars at the battle’s end, are depicted by the artist as the true victims of socio-political confrontation in the unending struggle for the redemption of the masses.
Renato Habulan is a social chronicler deeply immersed in the classical tradition, representing a dramatic departure from the vile stylistic shorthand that we are often compelled to forgive in the name of urgency. Habulan would do well as a revered muralist in any post-revolutionary era, possessing both a talent and demeanor that can hardly be ignored.
This exhibition is either a few years too early or too late. Nonetheless, it is well worth the effort to go and see it. These days, you catch what you can while you can. And pay the piper later.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Social Realists on Parade [conclusion]” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, February 14, 1987
