Melvin Culaba has taken it upon himself to use his art as a crusade against social ills. While poverty, greed and corruption ravage the land, Culaba will wield his paintbrush in order sildenafil citrate 50mg uk to document both the suffering and sins of the common man.

In Default, the first show under Blanc Gallery’s Three Works series, Culaba presents a trio of heavily painted canvases portraying the woes of the marginalized. Hard-Earned Money presents meager belongings that have been left behind, suggesting a life that hasn’t been kind. A threadbare how long does cialis last long-sleeved shirt, favored by men working under the sun, hangs from the wall like a shrouded ghost. A sidecar, the messiah of the miserable (hence Culaba’s play on the words “Saver” and “Savior”), sits abandoned and without wheels in a soot-covered shack. An empty basin relates to the empty eyes of a toy’s decapitated head and an empty casket-like violin case.

Culaba leaves hints that point to the larger meaning of his work: hiding near the right edge of the canvas is a snail sildenafil citrate drug test representing the slow pace of progress; the sidecar’s Spider-man décor and American-striped upholstery is a pharmacy online viagra dig at consumerism and colonial mentality; while the dog lurking beneath the geometric underpass is, in the absence of a human subject, a stand-in for our beggar nation.

The artist sabotages the pity aroused by Hard-Earned Money in Highest Resolution, which shows what kind of rude existence the man in the former painting might lead. In the center of the painting, the main subject wears the cialis online pharmacy same long-sleeved shirt and hides his behind a penitent’s mask. The composition of the painting takes the form of a diagonal cross, the longer bar being made up of the red shirt clinging to the man’s slouching body and his outstretched leg.

The cacophony and viagra vs no viagra confusion of the Quiapo Fiesta swirls in the foreground. Barefoot children fight, a woman steals food from a skeletal man, a diner pigs out and slurps his soup. The scene is noisy but devoid of merriment, and the action taking place in the crowded restaurant is placed in stark contrast with the eerie church standing in the painting’s background. The eyes need only be led by the cross-like composition at the center of the painting.

Having both Christ and larceny in your heart is, for Culaba, the paradoxical massachusetts college of pharmacy yet “default” nature of the impoverished Filipino.

The final piece in the trio is A Beautiful Confusion, a reference to the original title of Federico Fellini’s film 8 ½. This self-revealing work depicts artistic problems of creation, with Fellini’s idea-starved director as a starting point.

A naked artist, exposed and vulnerable with his back to the viewer, sits astride a seat similar to the circular white stools of Blanc Gallery. References to works by Culaba and other painters are shown on pieces of paper taped on the walls: one of Van Gogh’s golden wheat fields; the bare legs of Rembrandt’s woman wading in a pond; and sketches of Culaba’s own Hard-Earned Money and Unresolved, the latter being his prize-winning entry to the 2011 Tanaw Art Competition held by Bangko dapoxetine and viagra Sentral ng Pilipinas. Culaba’s motifs—dogs, anime characters, and animal masks—litter the space.

Where Hard-Earned Money and Highest Resolution are Culaba’s depictions of Philippine society’s “default” state, A Beautiful Confusion is a depiction of his own.

Taken together, Default tells the story of Culaba’s preoccupations, his motivations for art-making, and his personal confession of the tolls paid by an artist in order to create.—ll