塑膠樂園

A triptych of grim transformation, Alfredo Esquillo’s The Garden of Earthly Delights draws from Heronymous Bosch’s Renaissance painting of the same title. In a dark, tongue-in-cheek iteration of its 600-year-old predecessor, the painting depicts a vastly different world of consumerist pleasures. The works of the Filipino painter speak of the disorder of the modern world and present it through a highly imaginative coalescing of religious iconography, history and popular culture.

The sequence of the present lot depicts the upper-torso of a doll-figure hatching from an egg amid a moving landscape of symbols. The figure emerges wearing a crown, a built in WiFi router attached to its head, holding a pill as if it is a royal mace and presiding over a synthetic world. In the third scene, pacifiers rain from a cloud behind, a ball rises to reveal itself as a silicone breast, scissors masquerading as legs threaten to cut the cord that tethers a flying ship. Upon closer inspection, the hull of the ship is an upside down Virgin Mary statue, implying the subsidiary role of divinity in today’s world. Alfredo Esquillo observes that, from birth, we are thrust into the role of consumers. Below the figure, pills emerge from the centre of flowers that transform in a digitalized colour change while a black rubber tube excretes on behalf of the newborn creature. Ironically, the only non-artificial element of all scenes is an unmoving hand which serves as the doll’s legs. The hand guides the doll through the world of consumption, godlessness, plastic, pills and pseudo-nature. In this, the artist suggests the way in which the click of a computer mouse leads us through the digitalized world of e-commerce and internet-made pleasures. It is the strange smile that plays on the doll-child’s face in the final scene that is the most unsettling feature of the triptych and exemplary of the power of Alfredo Esquillo’s painting.