{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":1923,"auction_id":4,"set_id":5,"lot_number":"20","artist":"Alfredo Esquillo (b.1972)","title":"300-Year Old Slave","starting_price":600000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2017 (lower left)","medium":"oil on ethylene-vinyl acetate","size":"68\" x 44\" (173 cm x 112 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"As a cultivated social realist, Alfredo Esquillo has \nmastered the art of the contemporary allegory. \nIt is a character that yields a profound weight \nand social layering to his works, lending each piece a \ndeep historical consciousness always at work with a \npostcolonial retrospective.<br /><br /> \nIn his 2013 Afterall journal article entitled “Social \nRealism: The Turns of a Term in the Philippines”, art \ncritic and historian Patrick Flores writes of social \nrealism in the Philippines as bearing an allegorical \nimpulse that—as it appropriates conventional images \ninto the work—critically brings the historical past into \nthe present. In the oeuvres of Esquillo, we see this \nsame allegorical impulse as the artist often alludes \nto colonizing powers by referencing popular historical \nimages and integrating them into his work to piece \ntogether something relevant and present. In other \nwords, the works of Esquillo deconstruct the spectacle, \nonly to reconstruct what becomes an image and critique \nof a postcolonial Philippines. If history is traditionally \nwritten by the victors, then it is the artist the likes of \nEsquillo who seek to redress it from below—that is, \nfrom the reality of the Filipino people.<br /><br />\nThe charm of the allegorical work is that it always \npresents an ‘ever-slippery reality,’ as Flores describes. \nIn this Esquillo piece, truth teeters in between myth and \nreality as the ‘300-Year Old Slave’ appears reminiscent \nof the absurd hero Sisyphus in Greek mythology. \nParticularly curious here is the image of a Greek \ncorinthian-style column carried by our new ‘Sisyphus’ \nin place of the boulder. Aside from the corinthian-style \nhaving been used in ancient Greek temples of old as \nwell as in architecture of European antiquity, it is also \nrecognizable in the governmental architecture of the US \nin buildings such as the Capitol and The Supreme Court. \nNotably, the usage of broken Greek columns is not an \nunfamiliar motif of Esquillo’s oeuvre as we see in his \n2016 triptych The Colony as well as in the installations \nof his 2022 solo exhibition Bread and Circuses. Over \nthe recent years, it has become a significant imagery \nin Esquillo’s works as he uses the Greek column to \nappropriate a piece of the empire and shed light on its \ninherently decrepit state that nonetheless continues to \nconquer postcolonies to this day.<br /><br /> \nIn this Esquillo work, the body of the ‘300-Year Old \nSlave’ has become eerily machine-like, the crushing \nweight of their burden seeming to have disfigured their \nanatomical form into something between mechanical \nand human. Is the machine-like slave conscious of their \nown wretched condition or is there no tragedy to glean \nfrom a machine that has simply accepted its fate? At \nthe mercy of gods and empires, Esquillo’s absurd hero \nhere teeters in between myth and reality. By alluding to \nthe tale of Sisyphus, it critically presents the wretched \nand seemingly eternal fate of a postcolonial people. \n(Pie Tiausas)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":1000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":1000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":1201600,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":1950,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/4/5/lot/20.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":19,"next":21,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}