Dave Alcon: Too Close for Comfort

BY JAY BAUTISTA |

Dave Alcon was obviously mesmerized while listening to Upuan by Gloc 9 when as if by instinct--piece by piece--he illustrated chairs on top of one another in a voluminous effort to create an artistic statement. Sign of the times as the contest theme stated--this painting was his entry to a prestigious national painting competition back in January 2019. With the national and local elections upcoming in May, uncertainty was prevalent in the air yet Alcon was too certain of what he was creatively preoccupied with, unmindful of the repercussions of leaving his former job as a graphic artist to fulfill his calling of becoming a full time artist.

While listening to the popular rap song, as if being hypnotized, Alcon instinctively devised chairs as a graphic handle in discovering his new visual direction. True to his gut feel, his own Upuan earned a Special Citation in the Metrobank Arts and Designs Excellence Painting Category. It was the affirmation he longed for, setting it aside for almost nine years.

Courage

A chair in your dreams represent the many roles you play in life, as the saying goes. In Beyond Comfort Zone, Alcon’s first solo exhibition at the Boston Gallery, he continued to essay various metaphors of chairs as boundless and as a visual effect, “insurmountable” to our better appreciation. His unique proposition is to transgress chairs as more than just resting place of the body but rather elevating its aesthetics to focusing the mind of the matter at hand. With an all knowing awareness, Alcon’s chairs are remarkable for their infinite emblem of taking to form what his intended concepts can be. The little hours he has invested in them shows how meticulously skillful he ascertain chairs as immortal symbol of self-actualization anointing the social space with their presence.

Consider Courage where his chairs takes to task the heart-shaped image--done in a series--curated into a diamond. Alcon espouses a layering of values renegading discomfort and negativity. Notice how he ends each piece with a different colored chair like proof that everything was manually done by hand with good intentions--ending with an exclamation form.

Empathy is diptych complimentary shows how man and woman need each other to survive. Each colors are reflective in each other’s canvases. His whimsical play of colors are commendable enough proof that one cannot exist without the other.

Empathy

It is good to note that these pieces were done at the onset when there was still no pandemic and they crossover and were shown during the extreme lockdown. Still Alcon inculcated positiveness in the prevalent gloominess abound. He desired to inject hope like a shot in the arm. His chairs multiplied and became sturdier as they are well-stocked up and filled up his canvases.

It All Starts Within You (A)

Alcon believes whatever change must start with the bearer. It All Starts Within You are portraits of people who could be everyone and anyone advocating "forward action." How Alcon does it is he makes everything as a series that results in a multiplier effect and curated side-by-side one is visually blinded that they become unavoidably contagious. The simplicity of his pieces is overwhelming by their meticulous rendition. Alcon proves this point, in actuality, everything starts with him.

The most basic is the most profound. Six columns in Pillar exudes stability as a show of sheer force. Together they are bound to be an immovable force relating to the sacredness of life. But bound together can extract power of the many.

An Ivatan by decent, Alcon grew up in Batanes with a farming family that sustained them. He too has consistently been planting using his brush and oil paints as his canvases are similar to his fields of dreams. He wants to fill them up so as not to shortchange his viewers even flexing his artistic prowess at every masterpiece he churns out. Preparing for this exhibition, however, was not without trials. He remembers running out of oil paints and his stretched canvases and frames were delayed while he was in the heat of his creation.

Alcon’s visual style are fresh that it eschews prevalent realism and social themes in the art scene yet one admits enthralled by the concepts they emphasize. These recent works shuffles a new order—a kind of going back to basics with a less is more adage. Alcon’s strength is his consistency to his creative purpose in getting his message across to his viewers.

Pillar

Alcon’s approach to art may be more of a craft than a holistic aesthetic formation yet he has achieved pure spirituality in rendering the visual nature in a convoluted realist content in art in these trying times. As the months preceded after the exhibition’s duration last April, it will be up to Alcon’s viewers to remember and as final arbiter of his familial images if they are as infectious as to their relevance during the time of the pandemic he created them.