Finale Art Gallery - 3Anggulo -Pablo Baen Santos, Antipas Delotavo, and Renato Habulan

CURRENT SHOW
SM Art Center, SM Megamall

Vantage

March 14 to 27, 2007

by Eileen Legaspi - Ramirez

Antipas Delotavo
Diaspora (study)
Oil on canvas

In this riotous circus season of Philippine elections, the weather-worn stories of non-privilege (bare-bones poverty, a thinning medical and education labor pool, involuntary disappearances, unsolved drive-by executions, the shrinking pan de sal) easily get shoved into distended sideshow oblivion. 'Round this time of the year, anyone but anyone's disempowered sob story gets summarily chalked up as old hat in the sorry tale that cut-throat living hereabouts has become. Yet it is precisely in the midst of that deadening cacophony that the artist's proverbial refusal to play along by sporting a masked, jesterly grin becomes compelling - in training eyes and minds on what has ceased to be jarring either because truth has become truism or comes in an avalanche of muck.

For some three decades now, the politically charged sphere that the individual and collective practices of visual artists of 3Anggulo (Pablo Baen Santos, Antipas Delotavo, and Renato Habulan) opted into has been wrought through the ebb and tide of arbitrary artworld taste. Once rendered invisible in the chronicles of Philippine art history, that is, in the heyday of Philippine modernism, then gaining clout in the post-Marcos decades when social realism (SR) rode on a heady democratic wave of global realignments Baen Santos, Delotavo, and Habulan's generation of social realists eventually did gain palatability in the international and national art circuits, literally painting through streaks of apathy and acclaim in their attempts to find audiences for their work, even as seeking sympathetic minds and eyes were clearly not their only pre-occupation. Seeing this type of practice go through the wringer affords students of Philippine culture hindsight of an invaluable sort. Expressly so since this particular showing demonstrates these artists' ability to articulate oppositional affinities amidst a persistently murky social order but also because the exhibit takes place not completely coincidentally with such visibly ominous parallels as the allied artist-initiated traveling show, Tutok (Perspektiba,Dos por Dso and,Pasang Masid) and the coming of age of a subsequent generation of later, 'post' social realists exhibiting in the same physical space weeks before this exhibition came to pass.

Arguably a full generation after venerable critic Alice Guillermo excavated their practice from the once inhospitable annals of Philippine art, we find Baen Santos, Delotavo, and Habulan coming together to re-assert their presence in a creative sphere of deja vu, where artists of their age and persuasion may have grown cynical and white haired while the same basic sectors (peasant/labor) continue to bear the brunt of elite maneuverings and powergrabs, among other many historical injustices of centuries past. With advocacies frighteningly familiar and even candidates' surnames ringing a bell, these artists along with 3Anggulo's coordinator, Jose Tence Ruiz, find themselves still plugging at their craft amidst a world plagued by deep-seated chronic ills. After the unarguable urgency of martial law had lifted, the early post-Marcos years brought a re-assessment of the efficacy of visual tactics, and a perceptible change in semiotic play took place so much so that political messages could no longer be couched in reductive language nor hackneyed clenched-fist rhetoric. It was then that these and other Pinoy social realists confronted an artistic détente of sorts. Practically overnight, the once indifferent if not hostile market and critical validation streams had shifted gears, turning amiable to their ilk. Almost suddenly, they had become the unlikely, albeit passing, fancies of local media and visiting curators.

1 | 2 | 3 Next Page >>