Lot description
Elmer Borlongan (b. 1967) Pahinga (Rest) signed and dated 1993 (lower right) acrylic on canvas 61" x 61" (155 cm x 155 cm) Provenance: Boston Gallery, Manila. Exhibited: Cultural Center of the Philippines. Pivotal Masterpiece by Elmer Borlongan Seminal Work by Important Figurative Expressionist by Lisa Guerrero Nakpil Elmer Borlongan, painter, musician, and intellectual, is very much an impresario. He deftly orchestrates figures, perspective and composition to build a commentary of the world he lives in — grappling with his memories and his keen powers of observation to create a carefully constructed mise-en-scene. “Growing up in Mandaluyong”, he admits, a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Metro Manila, he “felt a connection to the working class”, their hardiness and strength amid a difficult existence. Two figures inhabit the painting ‘Pahinga’, a hollowed out man and his wife, living beside a huge empty cement pipe, the kind that line streets that have themselves been hollowed out to create water culverts. Both man and wife and these pipes are ordinary sights of the city but Borlongan creates an intense emotional atmosphere around them, against a scarlet, bloody sky. It is considered by influential art patron Dr. Joven Cuanang as one of Borlongan’s most important works. The male figure is, in fact, a prototype for the gaunt, shaven-headed figures that would become Borlongan’s signature. In this seminal work, he appears Goya-esque and elongated. His black t-shirt is drawn up over his hungry, distended stomach, in a typically Filipino male gesture. The glimpse of underwear and worn denims have been authentically painted in. The woman is dressed in drab prison-like garments, pointing to her lack of personal will and the confinement of her circumstances. Borlongan is first to admit that has been influenced by the great social realists of the Seventies — Danilo Dalena, Onib Olmedo, and Jaime de Guzman — who specialized in intense images of the underbelly of Filipino city life. The shorn heads are Borlongan’s way of removing the distractions that hair would present in viewing the expressions and emotions of unadorned faces. The bald heads “allow the viewer to experience more,” he has said. The power of the work is accentuated by its scale. The work at hand is all but life-size at 5 feet by 5 feet. Borlongan, it is clear, means to convert and proselytize; but also for the viewer to enter his world and draw their own conclusions. Not surprisingly, it has been exhibited at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
