Norman Dreo

Norman Dreo: Microcosm of life

Text by Pam Brooke Casin

Painter Norman Dreo probably wouldn’t tell you how crucial the location of his studio is in the creation of his socially aware and politically-charged figurative repertoire, but then again he wouldn’t have to tell you once you’ve personally visited him in his workshop and seen and felt the pulse of his perpetually bustling jungle – a dense world vacillating from underdevelopment to industrialization. 

Dreo’s artworks are a product of the energy and spirit of his community tucked at the edge of the University of the Philippines’ Diliman campus. And he has masterfully translated the sights and sounds of his community into his canvases, allowing viewers to partake in a visual dialogue with his urbanized locality. 

While some tend to consciously get away from the immediate milieu he or she is in and opt to create pieces using only the maneuverings of his or her mind, Dreo does the exact opposite. He chooses to drown himself in his community, embracing its idiosyncrasies. 

As a result, the artist’s neighbors and the ordinary people he encounters every day as well as the scenes that pique his interest and resonate with him take center stage in his oil paintings. In this manner, however, Dreo is not only depicting the way of life of the people but is praising them as well in the sense that he lets onlookers witness life as he sees it. And his sheer capability to paint such is Dreo’s genius. 

According to Dreo, the subjects of his pieces may not be as socially conscious as they are now had he not grown up in his current neighborhood. People might as well expect a totally different repertoire from Dreo had he, say, transferred to a posh exclusive village where poverty and societal injustice and disparity wouldn’t be king. Somehow, that just would not seem quite right. In a way, Dreo is probably thankful he has seen all the struggles life could offer him, for ultimately, they are the fountainhead of his realistic works. 

However, while most people may deem Dreo’s artwork as “sharp social commentaries” according to Ateneo professor and art writer Ana Labrador, Dreo says he is just “painting from life.” What one may see from Dreo’s paintings is an inevitable “reconstruction” of pictorial elements that he sees aplenty in his environment. He rearranges these elements in a way where everything is interrelated, making his opuses cohesive and compact. There are no loose strings in Dreo’s paintings but rather conscious bits and pieces of representational elements charged with allusions and metaphors easily recognizable by even the uninitiated eye. This is the charm perhaps of a Dreo: Its way of being able to engage viewers by using a visual language that is readable. 

Labrador writes, “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.” 

Being able to find a way around the limitations of a two-dimensional canvas is also one of Dreo’s outstanding gifts. It seems that he can easily create life-like paintings that are according to Labrador “akin to relief sculptures.” People may be deceived by his works and think they’re utterly three-dimensional, hence, characterizing his works as having sensitivity to detail. 

Noted opuses by Dreo include “Ipinako sa Krus,” a 1999 work by the artist portraying a boy trying to climb a wire fence. Dreo says the broken fence symbolizes the hardships and hindrances man has to go through in this chaotic life in order to achieve success and happiness. Chaos in the painting was depicted by the many odds and ends, trash, and scraps of paper and metal scattered heavily in the piece. Dreo notes that this painting ultimately represents how hard it is to climb up to the top, as in one could get scraped, bruised, and hurt while attempting it. 

Another worthy piece in Dreo’s repertoire is “Island in the Street.” It’s a piece highly charged with political overtones where workers try to clean up and rip off election bills and posters from a weak flyover. The flyover, one of the most prominent government projects at the time, represents the crumbling structure of the government. The workers thus portray how the government lacks in rigor to promote progress in the country, making its lowly subordinates do all the “dirty work.” 

Dreo admits, however, that his pieces can be a tad burdening and depressing. But the artist is quick to say that’s not what he is aiming for. He shares that his purpose is to enlighten his audiences on these pressing matters and issues and let them decide to finally do something about them. While there are some dismal pictorial devices present in Dreo’s works, there are also hopeful and optimistic things in them – a contagious smile plastered on a child’s face, a brightly colored palette, or a sincere gesture of a son to his father. 

Recently, Dreo is preoccupied with painting “microcosms” of his society. Here he embeds thriving communities, public spaces, and intersections into computer motherboards. These pieces he creates using a bird’s eyeview. Using this very much detailed and laborious technique, Dreo lets his viewers see how life has seemingly become much like the hectic (yet empty?) arrangement of these computer circuit boards. It’s as if Dreo here is assaulting his audiences with very essential questions by amalgamating human life into these devices: “Has technology dehumanized human beings?” and “Are we being controlled by technology?” 

At the end of the day though, Dreo, in his suite of artworks, asks us these: “What have we done to live a life as tragic and muddled like this?” “Why are we suffering still? “What can we do to make our lives better?” The answers, Dreo would probably say, lies not entirely in his paintings but in you.