BY JORGE VILLA
AN art critic once described the work of Dennis Capellan as “Too beautiful to be strange,” and one wonders how to top that description, considering that the artist has topped himself considerably since the psychedelic invasion, by his pen-and-ink menagerie, of the local avant-garde scene’s collective consciousness. As the world turns stranger and stranger, so do Capellan’s creatures of anthropomorphic whimsy become more caustically beautiful in their deconstruction of nature and the nature of consumer culture. Capellan’s maniacal splicing of classical and contemporary tropes evokes not so much Mary Shelly’s mad scientist as it does Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter.
Just like when gawking at a burning car crash or an unspeakably lurid scene through a bedroom window, one senses inarticulate reasons why sanity would be best served by looking away or staring at more comforting realities. Yet, one also realizes the inevitability of one’s gaze being locked on the indelible offspring of Capellan’s pungently fertile and, arguably, fractured mind. Birthed raw and wriggling at the tip of the artist’s scalpel-like pen, the gorgeous monstrosities captured in ink speak more favorably of diversity than the cold-blooded serpents and crocodiles of high society. One even wonders how things have come to this: as consumer culture becomes increasingly strange, the rational response of the artful mind is to deliver beautiful beasts of our burdens out into the world.
Such is the fabled artistry or madness of Capellan that myths spring around him like magic mushrooms. Some say he learned to draw cryptids on the walls of his parents’ home in Masbate while others say he was cut from the womb of a chimera. Some say he illustrated werewolves in American graphic novels while others say his work eventually bit him in the ass and turned him into a lycanthrope, howling at the moon. Some even say he worked as an advertising art director in the Sultanate of Oman while others say he lived like a sheikh in the Middle East and had a harem of virgins. Whatever the rumors of Capellan’s past are, the veracity of his virtuosity is presently inked on paper.
Glimpse Dennis Capellan’s fevered illustrations at his sixth solo exhibition to be launched in Village Art Gallery at the upper ground floor of Alabang Town Center on Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. For further details and for art commissions, email jorgevilla.info@gmail.com.
