De-defining of Danilo Dalena

BY JAY BAUTISTA 

During the opening night of his first retrospective at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) exhibition in 1990 artist Danilo Dalena (b.1942) was apprehended by security guards at the side entrance and was not allowed inside its premises. It was his wearing of his signature wooden clogs that caused his apprehension. In his usual quiet disposition, he kindly requested to contact Ms. Teresa Roxas for him. On the phone the then CCP President immediately apologized and personally welcomed him at the Main Gallery.

The irony of the incident defines/defies who Dalena and what his art means. Garbed as a native Filipino everyman he represents how society looks down at artists and how we materially relegate art in the words of Harold Rosenberg “mere wall-bound interior decoration.”

Like a rock star returning for an encore he replicates a more formidable second retrospective 26 years after in Last Full Show by filling up more halls of the CCP consisting his drawings, paintings, sculpture and installation. Even more appreciated today his art only got better with the lapse of time. 

With a bustling art scene where an artist name precedes his art, Last Full Show de-defined and exuded all the fine hallmarks of Dalena’s body of work; that he exists only because he is only a result of his oeuvre. His being an artist dissolves and he is only Dalena when he participates in the process of creating art.  

As a true rogue nothing lies sacred or nostalgic to Dalena who enrolled at the UST College of Fine Arts when his father wanted him to take up law. Even at an early age, his artistic affiliations were variant and loose. 

Together with Roberto Chabet, he exhibited with the conceptual group Shop 6 in Sining Kamalig in Cubao. He reprises his pambalot series, a creative pun where he trashes away official communication and accolades to him by wrapping dried fish with them. He also reconstructs dismembered hinds and limbs by assembling them in Playpen. Dalena showed his initial virtuosity according him as one of the CCP 13 Artists Awardees in 1972. 

Even the CCP as a venue for this retrospective is one over the Marcoses whom he once protested to. During Martial law, Dalena was master of the ink, meticulously illustrating detailed editorial cartoon, rich in allegory embedding strong political undertones for Philippine Free Press and Asia-Philippines Leader and later the National Midweek. He devoted a series on public toilets with scum and filth as aesthetics reflecting microcosm of Philippine society.

Dalena painted his own milieu with his own artistic approach. 

Speaking of his privilege as an artist and the forced circumstance of his actions to his sociological context. He was prudent yet did not suffer for not being among those artists who painted what was trendy genre or commercial dictates of art galleries or collectors. In fact no one even noticed his first show at the Pinaglabanan gallery. 

Becoming unemployed when the Martial Law clamped down on newspaper outfits, Dalena would frequent frontons and produce his Jai alai Series (1974-79). Eschewed of gaudy strokes of the desperate, echoing ghoulish shadows of uncertainty of chance, he looked at Jai Alai frontons as cathedrals of faith and fate. He dwelt into the Filipino psyche by inducing game metaphors of possibilities such as llamado and dejado. He could have valiantly depicted triumphs however he condoled more with defeat and despair of the human spirit. Complimenting them with earth tones of brown, green and oranges, he composed throng of bettors, swarming in tightly pressed bodies pleading desperation and greed. He would be accorded the First Mobil Art Awards for these paintings in 1980. 

In more pulsating and quicker splats, voluptuous dancers gyrate in seedy places of beerhouses in Alibangbang series. Dalena seduces us with the rhythm and rhymes of bodies not lustful but fresh and fleshy ones on canvas. He implicates the viewer as if one were a guest on the next table. Less concerned with the ideal and formal rendition Dalena abhorred being labeled for his own kind of expressionism. 

Dalena never spoke in absolutes, more so in staging folk religiosity. Quiapo and Pakil series were more autobiographical in nature and a definite painterly peeve. They carried the same wit, humor even subdued irreverence of this Narareno and Our Lady of Turmuba devotee. Favoring the everyday he saw in the ordinary how art could inquire and even investigate matters that were considered taboo and illicit. 

Dalena’s portraits of his writer and artist friends are deep in character studies based on his inclination to each of them. Begetting their friendship, we experience his deepest and most heartfelt pieces-all in sharpness of insight and richness in imagination and naughtiness the way he specifically know them. 

Even in his graying years Dalena remains a dissident in the grand tradition of painting— conservative in form but radical in approach. Exercise Series exhibits beauty of our impermanence. Consider the folds of glands like terraces, how our mortal bodies naturally sag and wrinkle. Somehow Dalena conquers his fear of death as most of his friends have crossed the great beyond. It is humanness at its core presented despite potential unpleasantness in monotone brown hues in rough strokes. 

The retrospective may not seem chronological but the pieces may be viewed as one big mosaic-like picture show; one simply has to look and be disturbed or solicit a chuckle. There is a circumstance in each of us as we are reminded of our own folly in losing a bet, belting out a song with a willing waitress in tow, seeing that malicious dog scratching in a church, witnessing a bygone Zarsuela, or mindful of our increasing body weight. For the gago, totoo, and bingengot in Dalena, that would have been enough. 

In a last full show, as a sign of respect and honor, one must stand up for the playing of our national anthem. In Dalena’s Last Full Show, we remain standing in pride, as he takes a bow.