Crux Section

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16 Sep - 07 Oct 2017

Antipas Delotavo

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• Crux Section

  16 Sep - 07 Oct 2017

  Antipas Delotavo

  Crux Section
  Antipas Delotavo Solo exhibition
  16 September - 7 October 2017
  Tin-aw Art Gallery

  Opening Reception: 16 September, Saturday, 6pm

  In crux section, Antipas Delotavo portrays the common folk, a subject that pervades his illustrious four-decade career. Delotavo’s oeuvre shows the artist having devoted himself to this specific sector—the anonymous mass crucial to the nation’s operations yet whose lives are barely valued. In ten new paintings, figures evocative of the quotidian stand in stark contrast to the majestic colonial architecture, floral ornamentation, and machine components emerging from the thick smoke and haze.

  These familiar characters either wander aimlessly or stand lost in thought, floating around the canvas while remaining trapped in their own worlds. The boundaries between foreground and background are collapsed and the abstract converges with the figural. In Delotavo’s canvases, it is the dispossessed, the detached, and the debased that are given the spotlight just as the noise, heat, and restless activity of the streets are momentarily subdued to amplify the alienation, bleakness, and inertia that afflicts his subjects.

  This is presented as a cross-section of our society: beyond the façades of hospitality and festive spirits is despondence and inner turbulence. The dire situation many helplessly find themselves in hardly improved if it has even changed at all. The producers are still concretely cordoned off from their products and yet the mirage of an opulent bygone era vies for our attention. This scenario’s prevalence assures the immediacy of its recognition, a fact Delotavo is well aware of as evinced in his blunt articulation of the harsh conditions of life in the city.

  Crux Section opened with an artist’s reception on 16 September and will be on view until 7 October.

  Contact Tin-aw Art Gallery at 8927522 for queries and more information.

• The Crucial Kernel

  Jose Tence Ruiz

       The endeavor of image making, the individual urge to craft tropes from one’s stored matrix of desire, pain and memory, is replete with defaults. Painters bond to specific icons for decades. Fernando Amosolo time and again indulged in sunsets and bronzed naked river bathers. Bencab has not forgotten nor gotten over the vagrant Sabel. Botong has his fluid nubile gymnastic fiesta dancers and long-limbed historical protagonists. Malang had his manangs. Kuikok, Le Brun and Sutherland loved crucifixions. Even Ross Capili would not shoo away his butterflies. Antipas Delotavo will therefore be forgiven for his mantra: portraits of the jedermann, male or female. He is in the annals of philippine art from the 70s for the 50-something hunched old pedestrian menaced by the scimitar-like serif of a multinational logo in Itak sa Puso ni Mang Juan. One could decry the tedium, but in the historical context of the poor being always with us, of destitution somehow outpacing whatever GDP our young country musters, portraits of common citizens, powerless, fatalistic, resigned, passive and occassionally defiant will be a rather deep well from which to draw a career of metaphors. Socially committed painting, from Giotto, to Courbet, to Martino Abellana, to Edades, to Legaspi, to Stanley Spencer, to Rivera, Siquieros and Baensantos, has suckled on the visage of the disenfranchised.

  [For the complete text, download the PDF]

   

  For a copy of the publication please download the PDF below

  CV PDF