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Making a mark in the international art world as a gifted sculptor, tackling subjects such as mythology and religion is just what Duddley Diaz is born for.
Over the last thirty years, the artist Duddley Diaz has created a powerful body of work that defies categorization, creating sculptures that challenge notions of identity, sexuality, culture, and history.
Departing from the impersonal and rationalist aesthetic of academic art, Diaz’s work daringly combines the values of classical Renaissance sculpture with atavistic sources of inspiration in the figures of ancient mythology and Christian liturgical art. He takes Roman Catholic figures and cloaks them in the visage of Filipino pagan myths and vice-versa, creating a language through his art that speaks directly to the soul. Goddesses, owls, and angels populate his cosmology, hewn from clay and terracotta, wood, cast bronze, brass, silver, and ox bone.
His artistic range is no less varied than interpretations of his work. For Diaz, mythology enables him to materialize his artistic ideas. “I often ask myself: what is eternal in or beyond human existence? How could I represent it? These are the thoughts that provoke me to create my sculptures.” Diaz’s unique artistic cosmology has gifted us with characters and figures that serve as vessels of sacred and profound messages.
This book is published on the occasion of the artist’s mid-career retrospective titled Messenger of the Gods at the UP Jorge B. Vargas Museum. Written by noted art critic Alice G. Guillermo, it follows Diaz’s development from his beginnings as a child prodigy, fashioning santos from sardine cans to the monumental San Lorenzo Ruiz and enthroned goddesses of his maturity, culminating with his masterwork Pinoy Creed.
In the context of contemporary sculpture, Diaz has unsettled the notion of religion in the largely Catholic culture in the Philippines, and has profoundly probed the intricacies of wood and sculpture in his portrayal of the human and the mythology of its becoming, universally and also ethically, in what may well be a postcolonial milieu. This ensemble of preoccupations and sentiments will surely pave vast constellations for the artist as he seeks more trails for his vision in the future. The artist is envoy and the art is herald.
PATRICK D. FLORES
Curator, UP Jorge B. Vargas Museum
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