15/06/2026
Nune Alvarado
"Paginhas"
60 x 48 inches
Oil on Canvas
2011
Darkness and Light in the Heart of Negros
The island of Negros, in the western Visayas, has through the centuries been associated with the crop of sugar. The lifeblood of the island borne by the blood, sweat, and tears of the exploited sacadas, the hacienda worker of the privileged and wealthy Negrense landlords, the sweetness of the sugar has been diluted by unconscionable acts of social injustice and the consequent violence and death. The sweetness of the land has turned into the most bitter irony.
From Negros Occidental did emerge, in the Seventies, one artist named Nunelucio Alvarado gave voice to the grim situation in the land of his birth. The silence of his numerous canvases reverberated with the cries and anguish of the sacadas, here limned with their hardened mien and sharp, angular features, suggestive of their disrupted lives, and evocative of the large gulf in the living standards between the reigning masters and the virtual slaves.
Seething with anger, Alvarado brandishes his works as instruments of revolt, resistance, and confrontation, in order to bring to light the pervasive situation that through the decades has remained unaltered and the accepted status quo. Sympathetic to the cause of the marginalized, Alvarado brings his art to bear on the need to restore dignity back to his fellow Negrenses. His is a uniquely wounding, bruising art.
Beyond the fringe of activism, existential struggle, and Social Realism, these masterworks by Nunelucio Alvarado are ultimately engaged with pictorial and painterly virtues and values. Provocative figuration, expressive gestures, superlative skill, intense chromatics, individual style, and technique: all these make for an instantly recognizable – and immediately engaging – art.
In these Nunelucio Alvarado paintings, the shift from darkness to light is seamless. There lies the triumph of this singular Filipino master.
-CID REYES
