Daniel dela Cruz’s ‘Unbridled’ devotions
Some stories are soft and malleable, able to be shaped immediately into what they’re supposed to be. Other stories are hard and defiant, requiring more effort and time to become what you want them to be.
Growing up in Bataan, Daniel dela Cruz showed artistic talent early with clay as his medium. In fact, he was featured in a national magazine for it, and he has wanted to follow an artistic path.
“But I come from a family of doctors,” he told Lifestyle. So off he went to the University of the Philippines-Diliman. “I failed all my chemistry classes and managed to graduate with a prelaw course.” he recalled. That would be a BA Philosophy in 1991.
“My father didn’t want me to be an artist, but I didn’t want to be a lawyer either,” said Dela Cruz. So he uprooted himself from his family to find work in design or art, with no formal training at all.
“At the start, I was just in a factory, but the good thing is I managed to make a good career for myself there,” he said.
Dela Cruz also turned out to be pretty good at design, and soon, his designs were being exported to Europe and North America. He admitted being particularly proud of the first Filipino design ceramic collections for the prestigious German firm Villeroy & Boch. During that time he was already working with different materials, “from clay to paper to ceramics.”
But Dela Cruz yearned to follow a path that seemingly eluded him. So when he turned 40, he decided that he was going to go all in and become an artist—a sculptor.
“When I decided to do that, I gravitated to what would be the most challenging material to use. Metal, of course, came to mind, and the advantage—not the benefit—of formal education. There was no limitation, so I was able to come up with this technique that I would like to say is quite unique, which allows me to do all these details, allows me to do all these movements that, I think, not any other person can do.”
There is also metal’s durability: “One of the most beautiful things about metal is, it lasts forever.”
Women of metal
In 2007, Dela Cruz staged his first solo show, “Kandungan: A Tribute to the Women in our Lives,” at ArtistSpace in Makati City. This pivotal first show featured metal sculptures of “robust women defined with grace, strength and wonderful movement.” Women of metal would become a continuing theme in his work.
Since then, Dela Cruz has gone on to an illustrious career as an artist. The next year, he held his second exhibit, “Parangal” in Shangri-La Mall, centering on Christ, another theme that would be familiar in his work.
He was now firing on all cylinders. At the Festival of Nativities competition in Rome, Italy, Dela Cruz brought home the Gold medal, besting 131 submissions from 71 countries.
For the 2019 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, which the Philippines hosted, Dela Cruz designed the medals and the torch. By this time, Dela Cruz had his own product design studio called DLC Design Works.
“That was very interesting,” he said of the SEA Games experience. “Because that’s where a lot of my product design background came in. None of the technology was available in the Philippines, so I had to work with a company from Malaysia who did the torch, and a company from Singapore who did medals. And I was able to speak their jargon.”He has done public art (“Shine from Within,” the two figures on cubes that light up at night on BGC’s South Street), and also a lot of crucifixes. He said he has lost count of the crucifixes he has made for smaller chapels, but his six reflective church crucifixes are unforgettable. None makes a greater impression than the largest one, the 7-meter-tall crucifix at St. Michael the Archangel in BGC, which dwarfs parishioners today, just like when it was first raised in 2016.
Dela Cruz’s devotion to crucifixes is a combination of things he aspires to: “I basically made an agreement with God. I promised, ‘God, if You allow me to fulfill my dream, You will see, use me as an instrument.’ It blessed me 100 times over. Who would not want that? In a way it’s like immortality, right? I mean, it’s forever going to be there. It’ll outlive me. It’s always going to be a form of devotion.”
Artists helping artists
Another sign of his devotion to his fellow artists is Visual Arts Helping Hands Foundation, which he helped found in 2017 and of which he is president.
He has found a unique way to help. Whenever an artist becomes very ill, the community bands together to put up a fundraiser with a quick show. “There is nothing set aside for them. I come from a business background, so I have PhilHealth and health insurance,” he said. “And 99.9 percent of artists don’t have that. I’m an affiliate, I can get them any health insurance because you cannot be sure that they will pay yearly. Being an artist, sometimes you can pay and sometimes you can’t. It’s not easy.”
Visual Arts Healing Hands has a very simple system: “Anyone within the visual arts community, even if you were a gallery janitor, as long as a gallery vouches for you, of if you’re a professor, if you’re a student in fine arts, you’re fine.”
As president, Dela Cruz takes care of day-to-day operations, along with an eight-man board that includes Pintô Art Museum’s Dr. Joven Cuanang. They hold fundraisers every two years, and many successful artists are always willing to help out.
Throughout all this, Dela Cruz, 57, has produced a stream of striking sculptures (this is his 25th solo show; add to that the group exhibits and fairs he has joined).
Ever the tinkerer, he is already preparing for a major show in July with Art Cube Gallery. He explained that the original concept piece was made in 2014, and he’s been working on the actual exhibit since 2022.
“That’s how I work; sometimes I’d come up with an idea, the one piece and until I’m ready to have a show I need to leave it there. The title of the exhibit will be ‘Out of Eden,’ and it’s talking about man’s journey from the loss of Eden and our journey through life trying to get back into Heaven or whatever you may call it.”
Without limitations
The new show at Galleria Nicolas at Greenbelt 5 has brought Dela Cruz full circle, as it, too, discusses women in movement. “Unbridled” features 10 sculptures made of brass, copper, nickel, steel and iron, which collectively took a year to finish.
“In my first shows, my focus was really on robust women, the main point being to show the strength of the women by portraying them with a lot more body rather than muscles and giving them more voluptuous build, to show that there is strength. It’s not really the size but the strength within the woman,” he explained.
“But one of the things that may be plus or negative with me is that for every exhibit I do, I try not to repeat myself. That’s how I progressed through the past 24 exhibits, always doing something new. ”
Dela Cruz pointed out how the much smaller, much sleeker female figures in the new exhibit are barely connected to the much larger obelisks or pedestals.
“Now, I wanted to go back to it, portray a woman without any limitations. How much power is within her, unlike ‘Kandungan,’ when she was very motherly. She was very soft. She was a lot more the traditional Filipina woman we know. This is still the same woman, but nowadays, there is no longer that cliché of a woman being a household mom. Women are now as free as they can be in today’s society.”
His long experience has also impacted the sculptures: “One difference is, over the past years, how much I’ve developed the techniques in my art. I’m able to more and more make use of the qualities of metal, which is extremely strong. So, if you notice the women, instead of just sitting in relaxed positions, they’re all leaping. They’re all jumping, they’re all reaching out. But what’s different is that they are all connected only by single points. Like there’s a woman leaping out of the post, and all she has holding her up is a single hand.”
“Unbridled,” said Dela Cruz, is his testament to how women have secured their places in society in a powerful way. It’s also a reminder that this self-taught sculptor is still at the peak of his powers.
“If they’ve been around long enough in the art world, it’s sort of a recognition that ‘Hey, Daniel is doing this again,’ that they still remember the robust women I used to do, and now they can say, ‘Hey, it’s him doing this.’ That would be a nice feeling. They are familiar with what I did before, and they can still connect me to that.” INQShow runs from April 25 to May 4 at Galleria Nicolas, 3/F Greenbelt 5, Legazpi Street, Makati City.
