Time tunnel

I was 7 or 8 years old when I caught the American TV series “The Time Tunnel.” I cannot recall specific episodes, but the whirling psychedelic tunnel was permanently etched in my mind. Surely, stray episodes or clips of “The Time Tunnel” are to be found somewhere on YouTube University to refresh my faded memories, but I did not look them up lest I be disappointed by its outdated production values. I watched it on a black and white TV. Worse, as an academic historian, I might be annoyed by the historical inaccuracies and fantasies deployed using artistic license. As I recall, the TV series revolved around two men transported, and lost, in the past. In each episode, they are hurled, helplessly, from one significant historical event to another as the Command Center vainly tries to bring them back to the present. Such is the premise of cliffhangers, the reluctant time travelers never returned. To do so was the end of the story.

I remembered “The Time Tunnel” after viewing three large-scale paintings by Randalf Dilla that take the viewer into his personal time tunnel, minus the vertigo from the 1960s TV series. One portal for Dilla’s time travel is “En el Palco” (At the Theater Box), an exquisite painting by the 19th-century Filipino painter and patriot Juan Luna preserved in the prominent Paulino and Hetty Que Collection of Philippine Art.

Dilla enters this portal, first through his senses. His impressions expanded and developed through background research. Then, in Dilla’s deconstruction of the portal, the magic begins. Transferring thoughts into physical form as preliminary sketches, he reduces the now iconic historical image, into its elements: color, form, composition, perspective, and line. “En el Palco” dissected, part by part, revealing it as an assemblage of details—the sum of its parts by Luna, Dilla then interacts and interprets the work not merely by copying as a camera, scanner, or photocopier will, rather Dilla re-presents “En el Palco” into a new work called “Theater Show.”

Juan Luna (1857-1899) was born in Badoc, Ilocos Norte, and was a licensed seaman before he shifted careers and became a painter. Then a Spanish subject, he lived close to half his life as an expatriate from the Philippines in Europe. Luna is depicted by Dilla in the center of the frame carrying the painting “En el Palco” under his right arm. He looks to the right at a theater box with two seated women, one of whom he paints, from photographs, as the artist’s ill-fated wife whose full name is Maria Paz Paulina Rosario Carmen Amparo Consolación Socorro Vicenta Ramona Lutgarda Pardo de Tavera. With such a kilometric name she was known to friends and relatives simply as Paz or “Chiching.” Dilla made this connection by taking the indistinct coat of arms on a seat behind the ladies as that of Pardo de Tavera y Gorricho. On this detail much has been said and written about, though the general comment is that Paz seems transformed in Luna’s paintings. That is, comparing her likeness on canvas to those in photographs. Perhaps she was not photogenic and looked better in person. We do know, from a Rizal letter, that she had an attractive and pleasing personality. When you compare the two beautiful ladies in Luna’s “En el Palco” with those in Dilla’s “Theater Show,” we have proof that love is indeed blind.

In Luna’s painting, theater bills are dropping from the upper boxes and while the painting is best known under its descriptive title “En el Palco” in the prewar photo file of the gentleman scholar Alfonso T. Ongpin, the title he wrote on the top of the image is “Beneficio a Gayarre.” If accurate, the painting documents a performance in honor of the world-famous Spanish opera singer Julián Gayarre (1844-1890). Dilla plays with these floating pieces of paper, turning them into white doves whose shapes are mirrored in the tutus of the prancing ballet dancers that bring motion to “Theater Show.” This long painting of three panels is actually a train whose first car or engine is shaped like a saxophone and at the tail-end of this train is the theater box. In this moving locomotive, the viewer is transported from past to present and back, if you wish, on the tracks of painting, dance, and music.

An integral part of a painter’s education and training is copying. What the eye can see, the hand must be able to replicate. This starts with simple everyday objects like ketchup bottles on a table, to copying humans from life with the nude model teaching the artist anatomy, and the clothed model teaching drapery, form, and volume. Finally, the young artist is made to copy the work of a master, to learn technique by doing. Taking someone else’s painting apart and putting things together again often reveals new images and fresh insight. It is the way for an artist to take on the old and re-presenting it to a new generation. Dilla’s time tunnel is not a mere display of technique, but a reflection on the notion of history as a springboard for the turbulent present and hopefully a better future.

International Museum Day came and went last week. Watching the people who visited select museums to take advantage of free admission made me wonder what time tunnels they saw by looking at art and artifacts on exhibit.

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