by Ramon E.S. Lerma

Philippine Daily Inquirer . May 18, 1998

HIRAYA Gallery curator Desiree Dee had this anecdote about artist Nunelucio Alvarado (b.1950).

The story goes that one day, a friend of Alvarado was at his public-market stall in Fabrica, Negros Occidental, when a policeman suddenly accosted him and, without warning or even the slightest provocation, began to make kickboxing targets out of bales of produce. Unable to put up any kind of resistance, the hapless friend later told Alvarado about what had happened.

The incensed artist picked up a paintbrush and lost no time in transferring that experience on to canvas. The result, PNP SPO10, is a part narrative, part surrealist-expressionist catharsis in which a caricature of a rabid boar flails fish and vegetables about as it dominates the central pictorial space. With bloodshot eyes, and jagged red fangs, the beast is dressed in blue uniform whose clearly spelled-out ensign vengefully transforms this piece into a no-holds-barred rap sheet.

Alvarado’s caustic in-your-face imagery is meant to disturb, to antagonize, to question. From the age of 25, this member of the highly politicized organization Black Artist in Asia has been articulating the plight of the rural masses, particularly the sugar-plantation and the mill workers of his native Negros, in group and solo exhibitions held in Bacolod and in Manila.

His latest offering at the Hiraya Gallery (until May 24), Gahum ni Alvarado (Power of Alvarado) maintains the visual vocabulary fraught with pathos and seething with subversion that has made this mainstay of the Asia-Pacific museum circuit one of the most eloquent voices in the Philippine art today.

It’s a voice that derives its strength from Alvarado’s complete immersion in his community. Coated with knowing familiarity, the artists utterances never fails to lunge and jab at the powers-that-be Sugarlandia.

Who else but a native could have vividly encapsulated the desperate situation of sacada daughters who are forced to exchange tuition fees for sexual favors, as in the pointedly bitter Sugar Daddy? Incidentally, this work is especially close to Alvarado, who, according to Dee, was himself propositioned by a lass to be her sugar daddy, having mistaken him for a haciendero because of his mestizo features!

Teeming with symbolism, the work is a masterpiece of compositional ability and wry wit. Dominating the picture, a suited figure with a sugar cube for a head embraces two females dressed in school uniforms seated on his lap, with his pointed fingers clawing up their chests. Enthroned in a chair fashioned out of rows of sugarcanes, a defiant plantation worker holding a machete, on the left, and a barefoot woman with eyes covered and dressed in a duster, on the right, stand dwarfed at the benevolent padrino’s foot like attendant figures to some deified icon.

What is exceptional here is Alvarado’s ability to convey disgust and anger bluntly without going overboard on the histrionics. In Sugar Daddy, black humor turns social protest into a wickedly covert operation. Instead of legs, the artist endows one colegiala with duck’s feet, symbolizing the stubby, spread-out toes characteristic of highlanders. The other sports a mermaid’s tail, representing her coastal origin.

At the background, a single lizard is left impaled on one of several slopped-off tree trunks that hearken to generations of environmental abuse. Dee said it also reminds viewers of the wasteland left by Ilco ( an American sugar concern), which operated in Negros from 1908 to 1975. This perception may well be true, given the stars-and-stripes motif of the sugar daddy’s tie.

Receding further ground, crystalline structures (another tongue-in-cheek reference to the sweet substance) rise above an otherworldly industrialized horizon. Two of these, on either flank, are unmistakably phallic, whose direction and diagonal orientation are reflected and pointed to by the pair of penises the artist has painted on the sugar daddy. A subtle attack, perhaps on greedy developers encroaching on a virgin landscape? Much like the threatened defilement of the young girls’ purity? Many more layers of meaning remain for the critical viewer to deduce.

Revelry and depravity

Even more epic in scope, Masskara Queen shows why Alvarado has often been likened to Mexican expressionist muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Setting aside the resemblance in their dark, wood-cut style outlines and dramatic urgency of their forms, it is, in fact, Alvarado’s ability to create visually cohesive wholes from manifold Third World historical, social and political specificities that has led to these comparisons.

Such is the case in " Masskara Queen '' which does not fall into the common mistake of artists who leave viewers feeling gypped, holding a mixed bag of meaningless shapes and hues. Indeed, the work approximates---more so, surpasses--- the breadth and the scope of a very good film, or the sweep of a Booker Prize-winning novel.

Set against the bacchanalian revelry of the Masskara Festival in Bacolod, a female figure, whose massive, stump-like legs reveal her peasant background, becomes the object of desire of leering men, some of whom lasciviously stick out their tongues at her. Surrounded by a phantasmagoric cabal of half-nude demons paying terpsichorean homage as spectral columns of smoke billow forth, a serpent with a spiked-shaped head, hair standing thumbtack pointlike, slithers ominously beneath her. Pricked through her pubic area by a bloodstained sugarcane shaft, her heart has a likewise been skewered.

The spear is one is one of several that pierce through an amorphously shaped object that floats perpendicularly behind the girl to form what look like arms upraised in a crucifixion. Wrapped in katsa, Dee explained it is, in fact, the island of Negros lying on its side. Flying above the girl’s head is a sinister apparition of a stylized Uncle Sam in a superhero’s cape.

The entire scene is played out on a gigantic sphere Alvarado uses to pull the divergent elements together into a damning indictment of moral depravity, ecological disaster and economic strife that envelops Sugarlandia ---controlled deus ex machina by the trading quotas imposed by '' benevolent'' partner-cum-savior America. Moreover, it is a stinging rebuke of a people’s life of denial, who, in the midst of grievous physical and spiritual harms, refuses to face reality by hiding behind masks of carefree joviality.

Shadow of an angel

Alvarado makes further inroads in the study of this concept of duality in Sang Una Kag Subong (Then and Now).  By cutting the human figure in half into two pictorial realms the artist is seen to show the violent transformation of the primeval Aeta inhabiting a paradise world au naturelle to the malcontent plantation worker brandishing a glowing ember-colored machete. Covered from head to foot to protect himself from thorny sugarcanes, he exists in a gray, broken dimension of pike-like stalks and a bedlam of scythe-shaped fallen leaves.

While some may found fault in "Sang Una" for its uncharacteristics naivete, the same cannot be said of Hinigtan (Tied Down), in which a muscular figure glares stoned -faced at the viewer like an Aztec god of death about to rip the sacrificial male apart from limb to limb. Girdled by orange-red penumbral sun, the duality of her being is shown by the tortured shadow of an angel that cowers, almost comically, beneath a shower of acicular sugarcanes.

Standing impervious to bed of nails rising out of a styled harvest bundle, the issue of a woman struggling against the shackles of macho society is certainly nothing new. But only the menacing mind of Alvarado could have endowed this subject with such demeanor!

As a part of its celebration of the nations centennial, Hiraya Gallery is mounting a second Alvarado show titled "Kusog kag Kaisog (Strength and Courage)" on June 7. Judging from one work we have previewed so far, discerning viewers are already well advised to mark their cultural calendars for that one.

Also Read:

"An Angry Socialist Realist Continues to Rage" by Emmanuel Torres

"Narratives of Our Time in Blazing Images" by Alice Guillermo

"Sugar is Bitter in Alvarado's Art" by Alice Guillermo

"Nunelucio's Alvarado's Tales from the Wastelands" by Reuben Rabas Canete