MALANG'S DRAWINGS GET A RARE PUBLIC VIEWING

Somewhere in the exhibit “Mauro Malang Santos: Drawings” at Ateneo Art Gallery’s Wilson L Sy Prints and Drawings Room is a glass case with works done by the artist best known as “Malang” during his battle with Alzheimer’s and, later, Parkinson’s, from 2006 until his death in 2017.

- SCOTT GARCEAU

The Wilson L Sy Prints and Drawings Room

The works — done in oil crayons on pieces of bond paper — show the artist’s physical and mental struggle, but also the persistence of his style: there’s the female subject that dominates so much of his work—mother, angel, symbol of comfort. Anyone who knows someone who has gone or is going through this condition knows the bravery it takes to keep working, reaching into your past mastery for a way to continue communicating.

His daughter-in-law Mona describes how the artist would joke, when people took him for a National Artist, that he was only a “National Book Store artist,” and how he would draw on just about any surface — napkins, tissue boxes, paper pads, even the tabletops at McDonald’s, where he’d have breakfast most mornings, leaving behind doodles that were instantly wiped away by their staff after he left.