DE Veyra has another obviously political triptych in I Dreamed Alexander McQueen Tackled Philippine Reality, Too.

    Supposedly a realist picture of three display windows, or three parts of one display window, each of which is displaying a barong Tagalog, it is not supposed to be read as a set of blueprints for an Alexander McQueen show, as per the artist’s title, but for a kind of dreamscape. True, dreams are not blueprints, but the elements in this dream might as well be blueprints for a McQueen display window (inclusive of a diorama plan), because the triptych is the artist’s dream wishful of a kind of Alexander McQueen collection topic.

    As for the realism, note that dreams are often as vivid as reality, at least during the dreaming of them, even when they are not so much night dreams as daydreams. But if the realism here is of a daydream, . . . one can say that it’s really more of a day nightmare, in this case involving a militarized sugarcane plantation, a politician for sale offering his services or “winnability” in exchange for an offshore bank account, and a vision of a pork barrel-corrupt Congress, all of which, by the way, are not actually fantastic scenes in our country but all too real. They’re all there as we speak.

    Now, if the separate pieces or panels are details of a dreamscape, why are they vertical rather than horizontal? Well, firstly, each of the paintings is also a take on costume paintings, or portrait paintings, portrait paintings where the clothing often becomes as much the star or star-symbol (star metaphor) of the composition as their sitter. So . . . that is the reason why they were presented vertically.