Dire Patterns: Antipas Delotavo
[Antipas Delotavo, Creature Comfort, 2010, Oil on Canvas]
Date: 30 April - 1 August 2010
Venue: NUS Museum
Curator: Lim Qinyi
Guest Curator: Alice Guillermo
A painter entrenched in an unfolding milieu of societal affliction in the Philippines, Antipas Delotavo's long-standing practice is marked by a commitment towards social realism as an expression that lay bare society's physical and psychological states. This is a practice that is contingent on the shifting political and economic grounds that define the status and conditions of the underclass. Militarism of the 1970s, popular uprising of the 1980s, the waning influence of the political left, and the emergent global economy provide changing contexts to this practice, further complicating the vexing questions of art-making as cogent political activism, and its problematic relationship with the economic and political structures that sustain practice. In his recent series Dire Patterns, Delotavo deals with this predicament from a broader societal perspective, laying bare contradictions inherent in the necessary yet fraught engagement with capitalistic mechanisms of commodity and power. Beyond the purely expository, his art is both revelatory and interrogative, posing questions and pursuing implications.
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