DEC13_SUPERDUPERFINAL

Four Artists and an Island
by Patrick Flores
Nunelucio Alvarado, Brenda Fajardo, Leandro Locsin, and Lino
Severino are artists from the Visayas, specifically Negros Occidental,
who have contributed immensely to the history of art and the
contemporary culture of the island, the region, the nation, and the
world. In their respective fields of expression, they have shared a
creative language that both deepens the tone and widens the scope
of the imagination not only through the formal qualities of their
work but through the sharpness and poignancy of their response
to the changing world around them. In the milieu of the visual arts
and architecture, they resonate and inspire.
These artists have also not confined their work to their studios and
professions. They have worked with communities and organizations,
collectives and institutions. They have become teachers and cultural
workers. They can be considered citizen-artists who through their
rootedness in the island and their awareness of a broader context
have revealed the promise of art. They have performed this promise
through artistic endeavor and social commitment.
The exhibition on them for VIVA ExCon was meant to bear
witness and further stir up the sensibility of both art history and
contemporary art. Fajardo’s exploration of historical memory
through the medieval tarot recast in local livery and figurations of
movement, dream, struggle in allegory and epic has kindled interest
in and fascination with a post-colonial imaginarium. Alvarado’s
strident and incendiary depiction of the inequities in plantations
in Negros and its roots in colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberal
political economies is haunting, if not compelling; it is an imperative
aesthetic. The modernism of Locsin, internationalist and yet sensitive
to the local natural and cultural environment, foregrounds a practice
that is thoughtful and elegant. And finally, Lino Severino’s quiet
observations on the telltale signs of heritage in houses, landscapes,
and even political news attest to the artist’s abiding curiosity about
what comes and goes and what must prevail as values for life. To
them the artists of the Visayas can only be grateful.
The initiative to curate an exhibition within VIVA of modernist
artists from the site of the biennale was a way to let modernity
and contemporaneity interanimate. In 2014, it was Jess Ayco in
Bacolod; and in 2016, it was Timoteo Jumayao in Iloilo. In 2021,
Alvarado, Fajardo, Locsin, and Severino generously graced current
art and history.
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