‘Markang Angel’
San Miguel Beer and Ginebra San Miguel are two drinks familiar with Filipinos. Both bottles are easily identifiable and have been ingrained in Filipino art for a long time. One artist known to appropriate these images in his art is Demet dela Cruz.
Demetrio Dela Cruz is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist. Fondly called Demet, he earned his bachelor of fine arts major in advertising degree from Far Eastern University, Manila. He worked as an illustrator, graphic designer, and photographer for an advertising firm and design studio prior to becoming a full-time exhibiting artist. Dela Cruz won a Special Award at the Metrobank Painting Competition. He was also a Top Five Winner at the Philip Morris Philippine Arts Awards in 2006, won the Grand Prize Winner at the Art Association of the Philippines Art Competition in 2007, and was the Grand Prize Winner of the Lions Club on-the-spot Mural Painting Competition in 2008. He was the Third Prize Winner at the GSIS Annual Art Competition in 2019 and was shortlisted (regional) at this year’s Philippine Art Awards. He has also had group shows in Tokyo and New York and has participated in art fairs such as the Indonesian Art Fair and the Korean Biennale.
His latest show at Boston Gallery is called “Markang Anghel,” perhaps because of the Ginebra San Miguel bottle. A lot of people do not know that the original label featuring St. Michael the Archangel battling a demon was originally known as “Marca Demonio.” It was created in 1917 by a young (and future National Artist) Fernando Amorsolo. Ginebra San Miguel started in 1834, when Casa Roxas, known today as the Ayala Corp., founded the first distillery in the Philippines. Originally called the Ayala Distillery (Destilerias Ayala Inc.), it produced brands like Ginebra Ayala, Ginebra Nacional, and Ginebra San Miguel.
Dela Cruz revisits these bottles as subjects in the collection of detailed oil paintings in his 22nd solo show, done in trompe l’oeil (French for “deceive the eye”) — an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface.
Demet admittedly became interested in this subject mainly because of the label done by Amorosolo, an artist he admires. Dela Cruz explains that the main takeoff point for this exhibition is to launch a spin-off of “Marca Demonio” but he would be placing himself on the “opposite side.”
Amorsolo worked as a commercial artist before he became one of the most important Filipino painters. Pillars of Philippine Modern Art like Vicente Manansala, Botong Francisco, Malang, and Cesar Legaspi were also illustrators or layout artists. Dela Cruz identifies with these artists who came before him as he spent about 14 years in the advertising industry.
Art writer Benjo Elayda stated on the show’s exhibition notes that “Dela Cruz’s acknowledgment that Pop Art has been a ‘pivotal point’ for him as an artist, especially the way it obviously emancipated him from the general tendency to disregard, ignore, treat in contempt, or even deride the things that conventionally lie beyond the pale of ‘fine arts’ or the aesthetics of high culture.”
Dela Cruz states that there is nothing profound in his works, that he is just a simple artist. He cannot emphasize enough the secondary status of the pursuit of meaning in each of his chosen subjects and pictorial compositions as compared to the primacy of the intermedia processes through which they are carried out.”
This year, the talented artist received the “People’s Choice Award” in the 2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize competition in Hong Kong. This is another feather on his cap.
In Dela Cruz’s “Markang Anghel” visitors certainly could appreciate the time-honored painting techniques in creating a picture with such intricate detail his smaller paintings roughly take a month and a half to complete. These are truly works of art.
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