“Machinam” features new paintings by Antipas Delotavo at the Crucible Art Gallery (4/L, SM Megamall A).

 

According to artist José Tence Ruiz: “To envisage his latest portrait of contemporary anxiety, Antipas Delotavo appropriates the Latin word machinam. Machinam means “siege engine,” as in the catapults, trebuchets and battering rams the Roman Empire builders used to grind down the fortifications of their Eurasian conquests.

 

“For Delotavo, it is his ‘Jedermann,’ his hypothetical man-on-the-street who is indeed besieged from all fronts: by waves of advertised desire to spend on vapid consumerist promises, by the evolution of fatal disease that just keeps one step ahead of cure, by the unheeded disequilibrium which he inflicts upon his own planet, and by the moral entropy that sees corruption entangling his moral negotiations like a ruthlessly opportunistic forest vine.

 

“The new show of four paintings does little to soothe. Delotavo reports on discomfort with the same unrelenting scrutiny that he applies to capturing the authentic portraits and ironic juxtapositions which have been his calling card for the last four decades. He will have to allow others to do the comforting. Like it or not, like a clock that reminds us how late we already are, his message is necessary, if somewhat unsettling.”