{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":1716,"auction_id":3,"set_id":4,"lot_number":"28","artist":"Elmer Borlongan (b. 1967)","title":"Moving Forward (Pasulong)","starting_price":4000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2015 (lower left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"60\" x 48\" (152 cm x 122 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":"Campomanes, Oscar V. Elmer Borlongan: An Ordinary Man, An\nExtraordinary Life (Volume I). San Antonio, Zambales: Sayong's\nPasilyo Country Living and Bookstore, 2018. Full-color illustration\nand painting description on page 283.","write_up":"The Filipino everyman is the protagonist in Elmer Borlongan's evocative works. The celebrated figurative expressionist painter said in Oscar Campomanes' Elmer Borlongan: An Ordinary Man, An Extraordinary Life: \"All my paintings are of things I have seen. There is no overt symbolism in any of my work, but there is always a story to be told.\"
\nIn this piece titled Moving Forward, Borlongan depicts an office worker donned in his professional getup. He is seen riding a skateboard while listening to either music or a podcast using his pair of headphones. It is unclear whether he is going to work or going home from work. But either way, his blank eyes seemingly exude a penetrating gaze directed into the hollows of emptiness. It is as if the man has lost himself in the void.
\nBorlongan presents a familiar image in which the follies of living and working in today's profit-oriented, neoliberal society are harrowingly depicted. In this work, the figure seemingly pops out straight from a chaotic rush hour scene in the busy avenues of Metro Manila's business districts, the bastions of the inhumane tenets of capitalism and neoliberalism. In this work, Borlongan presents to the viewer a perturbing image of the banality of living and working in the present, in which man is desensitized, exploited, and dehumanized. Man is not in harmony with himself and others as a consequence of alienation (of labor). There is this only anguish-filled void of existing in a cruel society, where we are \"designed\" and propelled to becoming slaves of our preprogrammed destiny—the modern-day social cancer. In fact, the title of the work presents to us its antithesis; we are struggling to work our way to progress in a system designed to make us regress into the abyss of desolation, bondage, and subjugation (unless we collectively act against it). We have been deprived of a life and labor lost into the fracture of coercion and estrangement, whereas it should have been productive and fulfilling, therefore humanizing.
\nAs Borlongan once said in the Campomanes book about the people in his works: \"The people in my paintings don't show so much emotion in their entire faces, but you can see it in their eyes.\" (A.M.)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"
Elmer Borlongan (b. 1967) Moving Forward (Pasulong) signed and dated 2015 (lower left) oil on canvas 60\" x 48\" (152 cm x 122 cm)