:. hiraya.com : nunelucio alvarado

To Nunelucio Alvarado, who lives and paints in his hometown in Negros, the plight of the people in the sugar industry, particularly the plantation and mill workers, along with their families, is "a never-ending story." It is, with all its "strength and pathos" (as a Japanese curator recently described the content of his work), his "favorite subject matter," the Ilonggo artist says.

Without needlesly repeating himself - a tribute to the dynamism of his symbolic art, at once surreal and expressionistic - Alvarado, now 51, has actually been telling that story on canvas since he was 25, when he was initiated into the gallery scene in Bacolod City at a group exhibit. He does so not as a disinterested observer, but as a community-immersed artist who articulates for the downtrodden their muted aspirations for a better life, a role enhnaced by his membership in several Ilonggo artists' organizations, notably the highly politicized Black Artists in Asia.

In his most recent exhibit "Field Trip" last November 2001, he has completely relaxed the clenched fist that has punctuated, rather salutarily, the sociopolitical statements that he wants to make on canvas. The effect cannot be painless, even idyllic, excursion into virtually another pictorial landscape, awash in brilliant colors and occasionally endowed with the artist's signature symbolic motifs.

A painting major from UP Diliman, Alvarado--who hails from Negros Occidental, has been active on the art scene since 1975. He has, to his credit, a long list of individual and group exhibits, in the Philippines and abroad. He has received the 13 Artists Award of the CCP and was twice a winner of the grand prize, Philippine selection, of the regional Philip Morris Art Award. Until "Field Trip", Alvarado had, of late, been working on large canvases, the last time being with the highly ambitious "Tagimata," a 20 piece collection dominated by a giant mural.

Alvarado makes no bones about the flightiness, in concept as well as intent, of "Field Trip." As the title of the collection suggests, what the has come up with are painting--i.e., passing scenes and images--that are meant to divert.

Born in 1950 in Pabrika, Negros occidental, Alvarado took up advertising at La Consolacion College in Bacolod City and, later, painting at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. His appearance in group shows, in Bacolod and Manila, perceeded by several years his first solo exhibit, at the now-defunct Sining Kamalig in Pasay City in 1979. To date, he has had numerous individual and group shows, the latter including those in Australia and Japan.