{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":47412,"auction_id":95,"set_id":125,"lot_number":"165","artist":"Elmer Borlongan (b. 1967)","title":"Barkada","starting_price":2200000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1996 (upper left)","medium":"acrylic on canvas","size":"30\" x 24\" (76 cm x 61 cm)","property":null,"coa":"Accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot","provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"\"Emong\" Borlongan: Friendship that Shelters
Barkada forms part of Elmer Borlongan’s earlier oeuvre. The artist painted the work at hand when he was still a part of the artists collective “Sanggawa,” which emerged out of the “Grupong Salingpusa” and was founded in December 1994 by Borlongan, Mark Justiniani, Karen Flores, Joy Mallari, and Federico Sievert. Sanggawa mainly worked on large-scale paintings and murals and depicted themes of Philippine history, politics, and folklore, wedding them in an exciting intersection that cuts across contemporary Filipino society.
The Sanggawa painted in a unified style, opposing an individualistic culture and society. The year Borlongan painted Barkada, he had found success in the international arena and relished the savor of heightened global exposure. In 1996, Borlongan was selected as artist-in-residence at the ARCUS Interactive Residence in the Arts at the Ibaraki Prefecture in Japan. This opportunity allows international artists to encounter and experience the Japanese contemporary art scene and promotes regional development through the arts.
By 1996, Borlongan’s works had been prominently exhibited in several international galleries, including his 1994 participation at the “Fourth Asian Art Show” at Japan’s Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, a 1995 group exhibition at Sydney’s Ray Hughes Gallery, and 1996 group shows at the Singapore Art Museum, Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery, and the Asia Society Galleries in New York.
He also received a travel grant to Sydney, Australia in 1996 from the Australia Center in Manila.
In 1994, Borlongan was conferred the prestigious Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award with fellow Salingpusa artists Justiniani and Montemayor.
Barkada also encapsulates Borlongan’s artistic maturity: his full embrace of a figurative expressionist visual language, which was, to a certain extent, influenced by his Sanggawa period. Of his creative evolution, he succinctly writes in the monograph Elmer Borlongan: An Ordinary Man, An Extraordinary Life:
“I started doing Botong-inspired works in 1982. I was veering away from realistic and impressionist representation of subject matters learned from the Sena school. Victorio Edades influenced my artmaking in terms of form and content using a modern approach. My social realist period was from 1988 up to 1992. My first solo show at Boston Gallery in Cubao in 1993 was moving towards figurative expressionism influenced by Onib Olmedo, Danny Dalena, and Jaime de Guzman.”
Moving away from the influence of Fernando Sena, from whom he received his first artistic training as a young boy (Borlongan would also serve as an apprentice at Sena’s workshop, and Sena would be the one to tell Borlongan to hone his artistic prowess at the UP School of Fine Arts.), Borlongan began to incorporate distortion as a heightened visual device emphasizing the miserable human condition, especially that of the ordinary Filipino.
Barkada is a ubiquitous Filipino term, an all-encompassing word that, from a denotational viewpoint, means “circle of friends” but can also mean a sense of shared humanity, a chosen family bonded by shared struggles, common interests, and most importantly, a profound sense of belonging and solidarity. In this thought-provoking work, a barkada composed of (adolescent) children dressed similarly in oversized white shirts.
The composition is explicitly solemn, characterized by a somber palette, and further heightened by a backdrop possessing a jarring combination of colors.
The subjects’ eyes are filled with blackness and emptiness. The girl in the center, possessing a penetrating, haunting gaze, holds a small umbrella, to which her clique takes shelter against the elements. While at first one may think of an inherent teenage angst present in the figures’ stances, the pictorial symbol of a small umbrella says otherwise. Here, we are shown a harrowing image of poverty—“isang kahig, isang tuka (“from hand to mouth,” having only the meager resources that would be shared by all members of a household).
In another annotation from the Borlongan book, the artist says:
“I was a volunteer for a foundation helping street kids in Palanan, Makati on Saturdays during the early ‘90s…The life of the children was a source of inspiration that captured my compassion for the less privileged.”
The figures’ faces are rendered similarly, and they all share a similar clothing style, perhaps symbolizing the poor’s shared hardships and collective struggle against a fragile socio-economic situation that only caters to the few elite. Their blank stares allude to the phrase “pagtirik ng mata dahil sa gutom.”
Despite the outpour of international acclaim, Borlongan never once forgot to look back at the plight of his fellow countrymen, emphasizing that the impoverished deserve as much dignity and the right to a decent, nourishing, and comfortable living. (Adrian Maranan)","lot_group":"Painting","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":4000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":4000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":4806400,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":46921,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/95/125/lot/165.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[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":164,"next":166,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}