This week is the 43rd anniversary of Martial Law and we want to show you this painting to remind you of that dark period in Philippine history during the regime of Ferdinand Marcos.
Hiraya Gallery commissioned 28-year-old Batanes artist Randalf Dilla to create this 8 feet by 18.5 feet oil painting, called “Salvaged Memories, Salvaged Lives”.
The central figure, of course, is the Dictator himself, here depicted appropriately with iron hands, depicted in his characteristically imperious gesture which we Filipinos knew at the time that his word was law. Symbolizing the greed of the Dictator and his obsession with gold are the gold bars, tumbling down from a weighing scale, explains art writer Cid Reyes.
On the upper right hand part of the painting are the framed portraits of the so-called ‘Rolex 12’…The ten are military officers while the other two are actually the Dictator’s cohorts, Eduardo ‘Danding’ Cojuangco and Juan Ponce Enrile. What completes the visual narrative are the Filipino desaparecidos (Spanish for forced disappearance, adapted from Latin America’s victims of dictatorship), says Reyes.
These are our unfortunate countrymen who were the tortured victims of human rights abuses, physically vanished from the face of the earth. Martial Law justified extrajudicial killings, liquidation, summary execution, arbitrary arrest and detention of political activists, outspoken journalists and clergy, and dissident social figures. Dilla depicted some of them with heads shrouded in purple, the symbolic penitential color of Lent, presaging the Passion and Death of the Christ.
The Philippine tricolor itself has now been denigrated to a serviceable presidential tablecloth, bedraggled and chained as a virtual prisoner of the Dictator, before which he had once sworn his allegiance. It is as though, like Judas, betraying Jesus with a kiss for thirty pieces of silver, the Dictator was rewarded not with mere silver Roman denarius, but with gold bullion bars straight out of Fort Knox.
It is the artist’s attempt to bring fowarded to the present reality which should not be forgotten or rewritten.
See “Salvaged Memories, Salvaged Lives” at Hiraya Gallery (530 United Nations Ave, Ermita, Manila; +63 2 5233331). From Sep 23.
