Randalf Dilla pays tribute to Filipino masters in The M’s latest exhibition 'Time Tunnel'.

Images provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Manila
September 15, 2023

The allure of the old masters and the spaces that their works inhabit has haunted and inspired Randalf Dilla throughout his career. As such, much of his work also lives in these same places: many of his paintings are often set in ethereal galleries where impossible things happen – the floors erupt from under the viewers’ feet, the walls and ceilings stretch on towards the horizon, and animals and nature intrude upon the supposedly sterile space of the museum environment. In Time Tunnel, Dilla has returned once again to this same realm, yet where he once depicted the actual spaces that the masters’ works lived in, he now paints the galleries where they hang in his mind.

Taken from the 1960s television program of the same name, where lost scientists travel back and forth in time, Time Tunnel depicts Dilla’s own imagined histories in tribute to some prominent figures of Philippine art history, namely, Juan Luna, Fabian Dela Rosa, and Fernando Amorsolo. Their works are hung in the same space, and helikewise depicts them in his own paintings, yet the visions they conjured up in his mind’s eye – a train hurtling in, laden with spectral bailarinas and cantantes, the roof of a house bursting through as its inhabitants are assumed into the heavens, a pastoral landscape fading into memory, leaving behind only the images they inspired—are distinctly Dilla’s.

The eponymous television show famously ended on a cliffhanger – it was canceled before its writers could rescue their characters from their travels lost in time—and it’s in this limbo where Dilla’s paintings exist alongside those of the old masters.

Past, present, and future, the surreal and the hyperreal, the physical and the metaphysical – all of these collide together and lose themselves in this exhibition, inviting one to ask about the ways these interact with and define each other, the nature of the past and its relationship with the present, and the kernels of the future that lie dormant, waiting to be read in history.

Randalf Dilla pays tribute to the Filipino masters who inspired him through Time Tunnel. His curiosity about Juan Luna, Fabian de la Rosa, and Fernando Amorsolo led him to do a deep dive into the meanings of their works and how the viewers responded to them. His large-scale works in the exhibition were done during the lockdown (when finding models was challenging) and occasionally feature his self-portrait and his wife's face in the sea of symbols and figures.