Nunelucio Alvarado: 'A great artist, not a gallery pet'

MANILA, Philippines - Whenever a new business craze mushrooms all over Metro Manila, people call it “the new shawarma,” referring to the shawarma stalls that went up all over the city and eventually disappeared without a trace. The new shawarma in the city are the art galleries that seem to come out of every nook and corner from Pasong Tamo all the way to Kamuning.

That art has become a part of the lives of many people who have declared themselves artists after undergoing a midlife crisis or marriage breakup is good, going by Herbert Reed’s belief that immersion in art education can make for a better society. My only complaint is it is just too easy to get a gallery to open its doors to anybody who wants to put up a show, thus the idea of working over one’s vision and craft with some effort before getting the nod of one’s peers is almost unheard of for many people. One can easily put up a show and invite rich relatives to buy up a few pieces. Everyone is happy. The illusion that one has arrived is immediately achieved.

I look at the Paulino Que collection up at Finale, and I am struck by the general blandness of the works when compared to one of the last exhibits also put up by Finale in Megamall. The show Aba of Baen Santos, Delotavo, Habulan, and Ruiz remains head and shoulders above in provocation and thought compared to many of the shows of today’s younger artists. It should be that the more senior painters are jaded, contented with past achievements, and endlessly repeating themselves. I went to the first show at Tin-aw in Makati a year ago and their first year anniversary show last month, and the most provocative part of the two shows was the curatorial note written by fellow Midweek alumnus Patrick Flores. The question he put forward: “Is Philippine contemporary art overproducing? And is it overproducing derivatives?”

Without doubt the answer is yes. We don’t even have to talk about most of the abstract art in the Philippines, which more and more people are describing as Xerox copies of Lao Lianben and Gus Albor. Perhaps we have the economic crisis to thank that gravity defying prices may finally come down and get some of the better young artists to get back to basics.

There are two shows coming up by one artist worth going through the hassle of traffic. Nunelucio Alvarado’s “Baricose Brain” in Blanc Makati and “Arkabala” at the Ayala Museum’s Artist Space, which opened last month.

Here is Emmanuel Torres, at the peak of his career as a senior art critic, commenting on Alvarado’s year 2000 Metropolitan Museum show: “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.”

This explains the bland taste I get from many of the recent exhibits. After years of viewing and trying to understand the development of Alvarado, the experience of seeing largely photographic renditions of reality, with a manipulation of a gesture in the image to show wit or subtle subversion, can’t help but disappoint. The powerful images of Alvarado are important because his works are some of the very few visual images that can help make people understand the world better.

The back-to-back Alvarado exhibits are interesting in that one can get a glimpse of the artistic development of Alvarado, past and present, as he prepares to gather his works for a planned 2010 (his 60th birth year) retrospective of his artistic career.

In “Baricose Brain” we see three paintings of Alvarado: “Hala Sige Gabuta” (2003, translated as “Go Ahead and Pull It Out”) shows sugar cane transformed into steel rods sticking out of a deformed man’s head and arms. This is the Alvarado vision of the industrialization of sugar cane production and the suffering it has caused. The second painting is “Manonobli” (2008, “Beneficiaries”), which is the picture of a peasant couple as fish ready to be cooked. The work was inspired by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) that, due to mismanagement of the government and scheming landlords, has brought more trouble than benefits to farmers. The third painting is “Timos-Timos” (2008,   “Pain in the Eyes”), where recipients of relief goods, like clothes from the United States, have tears in their eyes because of some unexplained pain. According to Alvarado, many of those who wear these relief clothes do not know they are subtly imbibing the values of consumption and materialism in these supposedly harmless dole outs. “Baricose Brain,” therefore, is a thematic exhibit of how supposedly good things are playing with our brain in destructive ways.

The most interesting works in this exhibit are the drawings in pen and ink with watercolor. There are 10 mixed media drawings from the series called “Palagpat” (2008), which he translates to meaning uncertainty. For Alvarado, life is uncertain, and we are all like fishermen going out to sea who do not know what will happen, if there will be a bountiful catch, or if there is danger ahead.

There are two pen-and-ink drawings not part of the series but are included in the exhibit. They serve to bracket an important part of his development as an artist. One drawing is “Daluk-Daluk” (1994 translated as “Greed”), which is a study of peasants grieving over a small coffin; while above them rapacious beasts celebrate their riches. The other drawing is the last unsold pen and ink from the Lust (2002) series, “Utang Na Mo,” which shows Alvarado at possibly his most reductive, as the image identifies a Bombay as the one that sucks the energy of the poor. These two drawings are important because Alvarado’s most memorable images against poverty and oppression came out between 1994 and 2002. It culminated with his “Tagimata” (2000) exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum (organized by Hiraya Gallery) that Emmanuel Torres and Alice Guilliermo both raved about, and artists today, like Jose Tence Ruiz, still talk about the show as if it just happened last year.

In his Ayala Museum show, “Arkabala (flea market taxation),” we see a totally different Alvarado. The mellowing Alvarado now has a light-hearted appreciation of the life of the oppressed. For sheer size alone, the most striking is the 4x20 feet painting “Kaubay” (2009), a word he translates to mean companion. It shows a man embracing a Sto. Niño in the middle of a market place; where we also see danger, temptation, and celebration. This is very different from the mid-career Alvarado where he critiques the display of the Sto. Niño image amid rape and plunder. It was then for Alvarado an image of hypocrisy and colonization. There is a noticeable appreciation now of Catholic images in the life of the rural folk, while in his 1990s works, Alvarado was more animated with amulets and syncretic imagery (like the pen and ink series “Kulintas Kontra Panulay,” 1998, translated as “Necklace Against Evil”) in peasant life. There is also now humor in the life of the poor. For example, there is the painting “No Way” (2009), which shows a vendor offering a mango to a girl, whose back is behind us, but clearly the girl is giving the man a dirty finger as her way of refusing the desires of the man.

Seeing his current works, and with blandness more the rule than the exception in many galleries, plus with the hindsight of nearly a decade after his Met show, I paraphrase the words of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in describing Alvarado: Here is a great artist, not a gallery pet.