Dire Patterns

Antipas Delotavo’s practice can be apprehended along parallel considerations of the formal and context. His realism, one that privileges images of labour and their conditions, is associated to the rhetorical play of class struggle framed under the banner of social realism in the Philippines. The regard for the body, as apparent index of such struggles, points to an orthodoxy of social realism as a refrain of ideology. Such regard, however, undermines the complexity that informs his imageries. Delotavo’s realism 

is marked by a confluence of formal conventions, and a reconsideration of the tableau, settings and subjects. The archetypal imageries of the Filipinos, fed by iconic figures found in the paintings of Carlos ‘Botong’ Francisco, Fernando C. Amorsolo and the Neo-Realists formed part of the realist vocabulary that intersected Delotavo’s prodigious abilities for the figure and naturalism, into which he proposes the real rather than the ideal, conscious in his regard…