Elmer Borlongan, painter, musician, and intellectual, is very much an impresario. He deftly orchestrates figures, perspective and composition to build a commentary of the world he lives in — grappling with his memories and his keen powers of observation to create a carefully constructed mise-enscene.
\n“Growing up in Mandaluyong”, he admits, a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Metro Manila, he “felt a connection to the working class”, their hardiness and strength amid a difficult existence.
\nTwo figures inhabit the painting ‘Pahinga’, a hollowed out man and his wife, living beside a huge empty cement pipe, the kind that line streets that have themselves been hollowed out to create water culverts. Both man and wife and these pipes are ordinary sights of the city but Borlongan creates an intense emotional atmosphere around them, against a scarlet, bloody sky.
\nIt is considered by influential art patron Dr. Joven Cuanang as one of Borlongan’s most important works.
\nThe male figure is, in fact, a prototype for the gaunt, shavenheaded figures that would become Borlongan’s signature. In this seminal work, he appears Goya-esque and elongated. His black t-shirt is drawn up over his hungry, distended stomach, in a typically Filipino male gesture. The glimpse of underwear and worn denims have been authentically painted in. The woman is dressed in drab prison-like garments, pointing to her lack of personal will and the confinement of her circumstances.
\nBorlongan is first to admit that has been influenced by the great social realists of the Seventies — Danilo Dalena, Onib Olmedo, and Jaime de Guzman — who specialized in intense images of the underbelly of Filipino city life.
\nThe shorn heads are Borlongan’s way of removing the distractions that hair would present in viewing the expressions and emotions of unadorned faces. The bald heads “allow the viewer to experience more,” he has said.
\nThe power of the work is accentuated by its scale. The work at hand is all but life-size at 5 feet by 5 feet.
\nBorlongan, it is clear, means to convert and proselytize; but also for the viewer to enter his world and draw their own conclusions.
\nNot surprisingly, it has been exhibited at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
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