Provenance: Private Collection, Makati City

ABOUT THE WORK

The Jai Alai series in oil on canvas was a culmination of the figure drawings now rendered in paintings of epic perspective on the subject of swarming masses in search of luck or miraculous relief. The view of these crowds, these masses of people straining for relief in a precarious existence, their single-minded pursuit of luck, becomes a staggering and unforgettable image of Dalena’s work. The game, like an arbitrary flow of dice, with its winning combination of numbers, mesmerizes and provokes in the crowds of the oppressed and unemployed a temporary heightened existence compounded by hope and despair, by monstrous jubilation and drunken desponcy. In these paintings, done in the bleak martial law years, the betting hall becomes a metaphor for the human condition, particularly for society in crisis.