ABOUT THE WORK

As a cultivated social realist, Alfredo Esquillo has mastered the art of the contemporary allegory. It is a character that yields a profound weight and social layering to his works, lending each piece a deep historical consciousness always at work with a postcolonial retrospective. In his 2013 Afterall journal article entitled “Social Realism: The Turns of a Term in the Philippines”, art critic and historian Patrick Flores writes of social realism in the Philippines as bearing an allegorical impulse that—as it appropriates conventional images into the work—critically brings the historical past into the present. In the oeuvres of Esquillo, we see this same allegorical impulse as the artist often alludes to colonizing powers by referencing popular historical images and integrating them into his work to piece together something relevant and present. In other words, the works of Esquillo deconstruct the spectacle, only to reconstruct what becomes an image and critique of a postcolonial Philippines. If history is traditionally written by the victors, then it is the artist the likes of Esquillo who seek to redress it from below—that is, from the reality of the Filipino people. The charm of the allegorical work is that it always presents an ‘ever-slippery reality,’ as Flores describes. In this Esquillo piece, truth teeters in between myth and reality as the ‘300-Year Old Slave’ appears reminiscent of the absurd hero Sisyphus in Greek mythology. Particularly curious here is the image of a Greek corinthian-style column carried by our new ‘Sisyphus’ in place of the boulder. Aside from the corinthian-style having been used in ancient Greek temples of old as well as in architecture of European antiquity, it is also recognizable in the governmental architecture of the US in buildings such as the Capitol and The Supreme Court. Notably, the usage of broken Greek columns is not an unfamiliar motif of Esquillo’s oeuvre as we see in his 2016 triptych The Colony as well as in the installations of his 2022 solo exhibition Bread and Circuses. Over the recent years, it has become a significant imagery in Esquillo’s works as he uses the Greek column to appropriate a piece of the empire and shed light on its inherently decrepit state that nonetheless continues to conquer postcolonies to this day. In this Esquillo work, the body of the ‘300-Year Old Slave’ has become eerily machine-like, the crushing weight of their burden seeming to have disfigured their anatomical form into something between mechanical and human. Is the machine-like slave conscious of their own wretched condition or is there no tragedy to glean from a machine that has simply accepted its fate? At the mercy of gods and empires, Esquillo’s absurd hero here teeters in between myth and reality. By alluding to the tale of Sisyphus, it critically presents the wretched and seemingly eternal fate of a postcolonial people. (Pie Tiausas)