Nunelucio Alvarado is back in Manila, or at least his painting are. The Bacolod City-based Social Realist, with his scrupulously- polished works steeped in Negrense angst, has made a marked impression among regional curators from Tokyo to Sydney. He shows more of his socially charged bravura in "Gahum ni Alvarado," a set of 10 paintings currently on display at the Hiraya Gallery (until May 15).

As a reflection of the sort of socio-political milieu that dominates the Negros landscape, "Gahum" recites the by-now hoarse litany of evils that subjugates its exploited inhabitants: the sacadas that slave over its vast sugarcane plantations; and the attendant poverty that drives uneducated, low- income Negrenses overseas as maids and prostitutes. This is juxtaposed with the more predominant iconography of the various faces of evil: the impersonal, libidinous big boss of the haciendas-cum-industrial park; the abusive, pot -bellied policeman; and stylized renditions of male-gendered vices, like lust, gluttony, and avarice.

This delivery is somewhat negated by the dominance of male-centered erotica that Alvarado has increasingly dwelled on in his mural works. Phalluses, dagger- sharp tongues extended in fellatio-like stabs at women figures, and blood-tipped penetrations of women’s bodies cascade with dulling intensity, debasing what would otherwise have been convincingly powerful statements. Perhaps he should not be faulted for mistaking artistic power as that trapped within a Freudian straightjacket. Surely, what mindset, as anxious in displaying a leering machismo at every broad that bothered to look his way, could possibly visualize oppressive power in a better image? But seduction, to paraphrase the Marquis de Sade, is best achieved through pain, at several levels of inflictment.

That much is evident in the themes the 48-year-old Alvarado explores. In Masskara Queen, the woman as the victim is displayed in all her violated finery. Wearing the mask of Bacolod’s carnival queen, the native figure is smothered by the surface trappings of gaiety -her arms wrapped in the bundles and pierced with stakes. Meanwhile, her troglodytic feet tread upon a veritable Hell teeming with the damned souls, leery-tongued devils, and monumental cobras and vipers. Satan, wearing Uncle Sam’s top hat and cape, swoops over and drills her head with forcep-shaped arms, while a stake pierces her groin, drawing blood for a serpent minion to lick. Rendered in scarlet, purple, muddy blue and ochres, this infernal vision of the woman abused and terrorized speaks as much about the condition of rural poor women a it does about the (self?) identified tormentor as: Egotistic. Libidinous. Male.

The male as oppressive sex fiend continue its dominance in "Sugar Daddy", where the doubled-penised, golden cube-headed boss grapples his helpless, thoroughly-bored victims, their slightly elevated status as educated women symbolized by the light-iconed books dangling from one arm. Beneath these monumentally scaled figures stand the dwarfed remnants of familial support. The bolo-wielding father stands defiantly (if stiffly), staring with silent rage, on one side. The mother stands on the other, covering her eyes, resigned to the fate of her daughters as prizes for the leery sugar baron, who provides a way out of poverty, but also partakes of the last vestige of virginity in this despoiled land, symbolized by tree stumps that stretch on into the curved horizon. More symbols of the baron’s power lie beyond his victim’s reach. The phallic-like buildings, shark-shaped airplanes and ships all indicate not just the rich man’s power, but the very symbols of civility denied to exploited, feminine masses.

This overbearing tyranny is also seen PNP SPO10 which not only illustrates the policeman as the abusive pig that overturns a vendor’s produce at the slightest provocation (based on an incident Alvarado is to have witnessed), but also hides a Visayan pun (uten means penis). Its victims are not all female. In Sang-una kag Subong the native man is seen in a split image of both pre-colonial warrior, revering nature; and colonial serf, his red bolo slicing death through vegetation. In Kargador the noble native calmly balances the weight of devastated nature, spiked with crosses, on his back.

In his portraits of fellow natives, Alvarado maximizes the usage of Indian face-and -body structure strongly inflected in the works of, say, Diego Rivera, or Jose Clemente Orozco. Motifs that hark back to the late 1970s, Alvarado’s Indianized Negrense is a conscious (though consistent) reaffirmation of his artistic identification as a latecoming disciple of the Mexican Tres Grandes. Although subsumed under the heading of '' Black Art'' (for which the group Black Artists of Asia was cobbled together), the highly-stylized nature of such soul-shredding social angst makes one curious if all of it simply isn’t too mannered to be true. But here the record defends Alvarado with rock-solid credentials. Born to a sacada family in Pabrika, outside Bacolod City, Alvarado grew up with the soot of burning cane sticking to his lungs. Fortunate enough to enter the university at 18, he quit to work in the fields. His artmaking origins, though hazy, maybe have been profoundly influenced by Orozco’s massive mural for the Risen Lord in the Catholic chapel at Victorias. Being near Bacolod had its advantages, though. With a clutch of incredibly rich (by local standards) families renowned for their extravagant spending habits, the city was a mecca for starving Illongo artists catering to the affected cosmopolitanism of its leading scions. With the efforts of the late Jose Joya in organizing artist groups in the mid-1970s, Alvarado found himself in a small but dynamic market catering to the sophisticated Expressionist works then popular among landowning intelligensia, a market equally exploited by the wealthier Charlie Co. This was parlayed into an art career that caught the eye of Manila curators, like Bobi Valenzuela, whose connections among gallery owners and foreign embassies proved fruitful. But it is as a Negrense that Alvarado identifies himself still, and to this day, he bases himself in Bacolod, foraying into Manila or Sydney only when exhibition opportunities present themselves.

There is no doubt that Alvarado’s out put is highly stylized, adapted to the emotional debates of rural barbarity occurring in the haciendas surrounding the mansions of the art-loving Negrense elite. It has a potential power to overwhelm the viewer into a cathartic reassessment of his / her social responsibility. That this is done "without needlessly repeating himself," as the exhibition notes assert, may be stretching the point a bit. Not only does Alvarado make it a habit to be distinctive to the extent of parodying himself, he also continues to evoke that power through a long precedence of' "heroes" from Orozco (a favorite of mine for contemporary Figurative Expressionists), to Ang Kiukuk (and through him, the distinctly macabre stylization of Ecuadorean Expressionist Osvaldo Guayasamin).

Repetition, of course, is no great sin, unless the artist labors under the pretense that anything he does must be "completely original," birthed like a fully formed Athena, which must be endlessly reformulated. In the end, it is what the artist has contributed to the society in which he/she exists that truly counts as relevant. If Alvarado has done this by bridging the gaps between Negros’s highly segregated social classes, then so much the better to applaud him. Otherwise, what point is it to ideologically root for one side, while satisfying the decorative fantasies of the other?

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

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