Norman Dreo’s brilliant world

Norman Dreo paints from life. Having grown up in a community at the edge of the University of the Philippines’ Diliman campus, he emerged from this throbbing colony vividly interpreting its energy on his canvas. The 32-year-old artist came to critics’ and collectors’ attention after winning many art contests. One of the first major awards he received was as a finalist in the 1991 Metrobank Painting Competition. His talent for figurative painting marked many of his prizewinning works. These were brimming with details and color. In a recent exhibition at the Liongoren Gallery in Cubao, Dreo displayed his expertise by painting elements and used parts of the motherboard of computers to represent busy urban communities.

To begin to understand Dreo’s art, we have to look at the world, which he has inhabited physically, as well as psychically. He grew up in a marginalized hamlet of the UP campus where most of the non-academic staffmembers live. The university employed Dreo’s father as carpenter and maintenance crew. Their neighborhood is a compact and dense district, straddling between self-sufficiency and dependence on the authorities that almost always ignore them for development projects. Such a condition almost always shape hardy people who are as obstinate as they are proud. Dreo, who not long ago left for Vermont Studio Center in the US after being awarded a Freeman Fellowship, displays these characteristics with a good measure of a sense of humor.

Driving through its narrow streets is a nightmare for inexperienced drivers like me. From a recent experience I realized that many residents prefer to conduct their business in the middle of the street. They would not budge to accommodate outsiders and their vehicles. Given those conditions, I had to learn to negotiate quickly and organize my mind to find the best way without offending the residents. Dreo has done those things plus more during his growing years. Anyone who stays in a place for long periods is bound to take things for granted since they begin to be imbedded into everyday practices. Being able to paint the swarm of people and things is Dreo’s outstanding gift. He translates what he sees and organizes them into his remodeled world.

The idea of being able to manifest his own culture in an artistic way distinguishes Dreo and his paintings. Many observers noted that his works are sharp social commentaries. Perhaps in some oblique way he is making that point but Dreo just prefers to paint from life. Those images that appear on his canvases are mostly a reconstruction of the things around him. He interprets his environment partly as a result of a technical challenge that affects talented painters like him. In Dreo’s case, what preoccupied him in the beginning is showing the patterns he sees around him. That is, finding a resolution to pictorial problems in terms of composition and realistic representation.

Increasingly he devised two important manners of depiction that marked his paintings. One is by physically creating paintings that are akin to relief sculptures. Viewing them from the side, these paintings are three -dimensional works using mixed media. This has since extended to his frames whenever he sees the need to set off his art works around borders. Otherwise he leaves his paintings impeded only by the edges of his surfaces. Perhaps he has learned the skill and patience of preparing well his painting bases from his carpenter-father. Dreo’s focus on details and craftsmanship characterize his works.

This is particularly discernible in some of the more complex works he has made, such as in a 1998 work, "Dito Po Sa Amin." In that mixed media work of a landscape dotted with figures, Dreo drew attention to its tactile quality by using layers of wood on some figures. His technique is similar to decoupage. Rising to the challenge of how best to represent his ideas, he gives attention to details that refer not only to his painting methods but also in creating devises to achieve the effects he wants to produce.

On another level, Dreo is also painting from life to make sense of the things happening around him. His other important device to resolve challenges to representation is to show views from the front and then putting a layer of pattern by painting in chainlink fencing wires. Similar to those enclosures we find commonplace around our neighborhoods.

In a 1999 work, "Ipinako sa Crus," Dreo showed a boy trying to climb a broken wire fence to get to the chaotic scrap storage on the other side. The fence he is climbing can also be taken as a symbol of the boy’s barrier to get past it and perhaps take a few things to sell. But the main aspect of Dreo’s painting that has caught my interest is his way of creating patterns through layers of pictorial devises.

After having viewed some of his older works at the gallery, I turned to his more recent works lengthily titled, "Warranty Void if Removed: Appraisals of Harmony." Reading more like a plea rather than an exhibit, his designation alludes to our digital age with which the computers enables. He began working on this idea and successfully created a painting that became a finalist in the 2000 Philip Morris Art Awards in Singapore. In this new collection of paintings, Dreo worked more on a bird’s eye-view of busy intersections and public spaces.

The places with which he refers to may be seen as chaotic from outsiders’ point of view. He takes us on top of these areas to draw our attention to the possibility that there is order in chaos. Otherwise he seems to be stressing that those establishments he portrayed, such as marketplaces, would not work. Dreo decided that these scenes are akin to computer motherboards, which is the nerve center of the central processing units (otherwise known as CPU). Looking at them as though overhead, his paintings also reminded me of road maps that connect places and people. This is one reason why he always retains human figures in his paintings.

In this sense, Dreo’s symbolism not only focus on incorporating images of high-tech with painting – the now anachronistic way of making images – in our computer age. Rather as his title pleads to us, harmony is not merely contrived but possible in the midst of chaotic jumbles. Ultimately, he seems to be saying to viewers everything is connected. Dreo’s sense of humor and positive views is manifested well in living color. Just like him, he is conveying the idea that it is up to us to figure out our world as best as we can. If human beings were capable of building and dealing with computers, surely it would be logical to put harmony in a place where we imagine there is none.

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