The Amorsolo myth of the rural idyll never took root among the artists of Bacolod in Negros Occidental, Western Visayas island of Negros. Instead of the familiar landscape of rice paddies, the province is given over to the monocrop of sugarcane in vast plantations owned by a handful of elites. The landscapes and genre paintings of Bacolod artists such as Nunelucio Alvarado reflect this specific character of the province.

Far from being a land of sweetness and light with rosy maidens carrying bilaos laden with fruit in lush tropical sceneries such as Amorsolo untiringly evoked, Alvarado’s  countryside is fraught with dark shadows and sinister presences against passages of blazing light in a harsh landscape. For more than anywhere else, contrasts have been stark since the sugar industry was established in the province with the first sugar mill put up in the 19th century by the English entrepreneur Nicholas Loney. That was also the period when the country’s ports were thrown open to international trade, marking the beginning of export crop agriculture.

These times and conditions, past and present, make up the imagery of Nunelucio Alvarado. His art draws its dynamism from the conflicts and sharply delineated class lines in his home province that has often been described as a smoldering social volcano. Seeking big economic opportunities in sugar, the landed elites converted their ricelands to sugar cane plantations. In the midst of this rural landscape were built their mansions of wood and stone overlooking the large tracts of land leveling all around even as far as the horizon. But out in the fields the peasants then and now have labored in planting unending rows of cane or in harvesting with their broad espading with its hooked blade cutting down the tall rounded stalks which they then carry in bundles on their shoulders to the trains headed for the sugar mill. During the milling season, the behemoths of gray steel incessantly spew forth a white smoke with a residue that settles on the skin like the essence of molasses.

Tagimata

In the latest series Tagimata (Eyesore) exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, the personages that inhabit the sugar workers’ nightmares have become larger than life and compellingly vivid with an almost terrifying vibrancy. Contemporary reality rises to a symbolic/surrealist level where the forces in conflict seem to close in upon the viewer as in a dark cave where the flashes of lightning from all sides are the powerful colors and extraordinarily expressive forms of humanoids which reveal their true meanings in symbols. They are the offspring of the centuries-old social struggle between classes, the owners of the vast estates and the producers of the wealth from which they are alienated. It is a conflict which has shaken the land to its very foundations and has thus given rise, on one hand, to a brood of human giants with piercing eyes which do not flinch and, on the other hand, to monsters with eyes devoid of light.

The artist has released in a pure and fierce stream his irony, bitterness, pain, and fury at the conditions that surround him where there is little promise of redemption. While tragedy, death, and human destruction are ever-present, the general tone is not one of bleakness and despair but one of intense energy, strength, and passion. In Puwersa, a key work of the series, two farm workers, male and female, standing frontally the entire height of the pictorial space assert their strong presence in vivid blue tones. Their clear penetrating eyes launch a defiant challenge to the system and convey their high moral position. Their strength in producing the country’s wealth is brought out in their yellow blazing hands marked by a pattern of gnarled veins. They are, however, in the clutches of the system as can be construed from the large inhuman arms ending in metal claws that encircle the woman’s head and by the spikes that pierce the man’s shoulders. Between the two, upon the background of glowing thorns is their child entangled in vines, a dark apple of colonial vintage stuck in its mouth while he grasps a white lotus bud signifying transcendence.

Still within the context of the agrarian struggle are issues confronted by the community of sugar workers but which are also shared by the country at large. Among these are the exploitation of women and children, prostitution, and migrant labor. In one work, a young girl is nailed to a cross made up of cane stalks and thorns in a life devoid of basic comfort or simple joys. In another, a child screams in terror at her parents imprisoned and transformed into robotlike figures by the system. A mother, like the Pieta, carries the skeletal frame of a child dead of hunger in a withered landscape. A bold dancer in the glare of a spotlight strips on a table surrounded by drooling vampires in a space where peso bills and articles of clothing are flying around in a veritable climate of commodification. Along the same theme, a tray holds a neatly arranged pile of female nudes, their bodies neatly sculpted like pastries with decorative touches. Only their piercing eyes and taut mouths give evidence of their humanity, while along the sides red-eyed monsters lick at them with avid tongues. These conditions often end in the tragedy of Inday coming home in a coffin, her bruised face wreathed by flowers and a ribbon bearing the simple message, Palangga ka Namon (We love you.). To this there is a counterpart, however, in the Gomburza sa Hacienda in which a human figure, its head surrounded by spikes, lunges forward against the smoky red background in anger and defiance. The highly compact figure in blue and yellow tones is a pure expression of passionate rage as though it would throw itself bodily at the enemy. Its eyes, concentric circles of blazing yellow, signify that it has gone beyond specific circumstance and time, beyond circumspection and compromise, and has become an icon of challenge. But it bears hope with it, in the child figure in human tones dwelling in its bosom.

Nonetheless, the forces of evil are rampant. Luga Twerka has shed his smiling human disguise to reveal himself as the monster that he is. With a gun conspicuously tucked in his trousers and a sharp blade that also doubles as a phallus, he aggressively confronts his victims with his red eyes and avid tongue. He is likely a member of paramilitary groups which terrorize the countryside with their rightwing ideological reflexes and unbridled lusts. In the city, a faceless figure in barong tagalog seated at a government office table flanked by the pictures of the Sacred Heart and President Estrada waits for deals with brown envelopes quietly passed to him under the table. A rich couple, the man in a striped top hat, gleefully count money as they send young women to their doom. Another couple in the setting of a church pose in their shiny wealth and religious security but under their feet a crocodile takes the alms from a beggar.

In these latest works, Nunelucio Alvarado transcends classical realism to mount a social critique piercing and stinging in its sheer emotional intensity. This series is an artistic culmination that he has been building up to through the years. It is a surrealist/symbolist oeuvre that is at the same time in close touch with reality in its grasp of current national issues and events. A great part of the appeal of his art stems from the artist’s immersion in people’s lives, his keen political consciousness, and his combination of acerbic satire and street humor. Yet always, through the bitterness and the rage is an underlying love for his home province and its sugarcane workers in struggle. As Alvarado stresses, “While this unjust system prevails in our country, artists will always continue to produce meaningful works.” He has expressed the wish that we experience the power and strength of art through the next hundred years. He has achieved this in his present series, an opening salvo to the new century, and we can only say, Padayon, Utod! Keep on, brother, and with you all artists of vision.

Also Read:

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

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

"The Menacing Power of Alvarado's Art" by Ramos E.S. Lerma

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