Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Literature: Ramon N. Villegas & Lisa Guerrero Nakpil, TWO NAVELS: LEON CURATED AUCTION, Leon Gallery, Makati City, 2016, p. 84 and p. 85-87 (illustrated)

ABOUT THE WORK

If virtually all human activity has become grist for the artist’s mill, what they choose to commemorate and venerate has broadened the horizons of Filipino art. In an effort to portray the paradox of urban life, the question of how people cope with the daily grind leads the artist to peer into the collective spiritual resource and the religious rites of the walking dead amid the impersonally busy streets of the bowels of Manila. Patrick Flores wrote in the May/June issue of Asian Art News about “...his (Borlongan’s) expressionist paintings of the city and its inhabitants who are weighed down by hemorrhaging modernity. On careful sifting, we may observe a recurrence of motifs and tropes... the bald head, distorted flesh...” Religion has become a lifeline. “Nazareno” is clearly presented to the audience as a solemn, if feral, visual celebration of the extremes of Filipino Catholic religiosity. Many devotees relate their poverty and daily struggles to the Nazareno as represented by the image. The work achieves its resonance by effectively expressing the tug of war between alienation and acceptance of urban customs and traditions experienced, those practices which blend not only the East and West in the Filipino psyche, but the ancient and modern as well. Elmer Borlongan does directly reference Filipino culture, but it is the culture of today, rather than that of colonial or pre-colonial times. The Black Nazarene is the iconic statue of the Christ carved by an anonymous Mexican artist sometime in the 17th century, depicting the cross bearing “Nazareno” on his way to his death on Calvary. Religious veneration of the Black Nazarene is rooted among the masses who identify themselves with the agony of Christ which the statue depicts. The statue is regarded as miraculous by many Catholics, and is enshrined in the Juan Nakpil designed Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo. While there are three annual dates when the statue is brought out of its shrine for the devotees, it is the procession on the 9th of January that reenacts the image’s ” Traslación” or passage in 1787 from its original location in what is now Rizal Park to the Minor Basilica. The Traslación procession draws millions of devotees who endure the forces of brawn and sweat anywhere from 14 to 20 hours. Some of the themes explored in his previous shows in the 1990s are continued and developed to a new level. In a 1993 collaboration with the group Salingpusa, their mural Vox Populi Vox Dei coincided with the much hyped Papal visit of that year. Their major work, The Second Coming criticized the Papal visit as a show of power of the conservative Institutional Church. His Gabay (Guide) is a hauntingly surreal scene of a person driving with an alarmingly life like, life size sculpture of an armless Christ in the passenger seat, a rosary hanging from the rear view mirror. The people carrying the Nazareno would be no different from his other earlier works from the mid-1990s such as Kubli (Hide) and Kumot (Blanket) which depict derelict city habitués in a style that recalls that of the Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch.