Pitik Pitik

In Masbate City, where sculptor Abril Dominic Valdemoro grew up, construction workers moved through neighborhoods like anonymous engineers of survival, arriving for work with improvised tools, patched equipment, and a knowledge of structure carried almost entirely by the body. As a child, Valdemoro watched them with fascination as not only humble laborers, but as friends, idols, and builders of worlds.

Pitik-Pitik marks the artist’s return to sculpture two years after he last showed sculptural pieces in Damgo, and after being Grand Awardee in the sculpture category at the 2023 MADE (Metrobank Art and Design Excellence) competition. This exhibition may also be considered a continuation of his first solo, Kuridas, where he paid tribute to laborers, farmers, and fishermen, reaffirming the material and social terrain that has long shaped his practice. Working with the hardy and weather-proof marine epoxy, G.I. wire, patching compound, acrylic paint, and found or salvaged construction tools and materials, Valdemoro creates elongated figures modeled after local persona, with hand-worked surfaces bearing markings from the artist's fingers, assembled from the same economy of invention that defines provincial construction culture itself.

Pitik-pitik in construction refers to the string marker attached to the plumb or hulog, a simple tool used to establish the straightness of walls and vertical alignment. But pitik-pitik also evokes irregularity, piecemeal labor, unstable arrangements, and makeshift survival. In many settings, construction work rarely offers permanence. There are no long-term contracts, only projects. One day there is work, the next day there is none. Labor happens in fragments, depending on daily necessity. The workers in Valdemoro’s sculptures embody this condition: exhausted yet impossibly upright. Yet there is humor, still, through titles that tickle the mind. Bender Benta for the wiring expert who can also sell stolen kilos of the material in times of dire need, Masonurin with his handy trowel for smooth wall finishes, Hulog Hulogan with steady hands, his reliable plumb, and installment plans, Lebelador Mayor whose wingspan maximizes a clear neon hose for that horizontal leveling bubble using either water or cola, Boteroy, the runner who apprentices with master carpenters, to Tay Batong Pinagpala, an actual elder worker whose shoveling is next to blessedness. They possess the comic rhythm of street nicknames and jobsite banter, Valdemoro understanding that humor is a coping mechanism and sometimes resistance against fatigue.

His figures rise beyond three feet, while the central work reaches nearly seven feet atop its pedestal. Installed this way, they recall the devotional santos that Valdemoro worked on earlier in his career. Like saints carried during processions, these laborers are given their well-deserved spotlight, and with Pormanda Pormando standing tall and elevated above eye level like a boss, transformed into icons of everyday endurance. Yet unlike traditional santos representing heavenly miracles, Valdemoro’s figures perform earthly ones: they raise walls, repair homes, carry hollow blocks, align structures, and improvise entire systems of support from limited means. They are daily deities of infrastructure.

By refusing to romanticize poverty and insisting on reverence, Valdemoro does not flatten construction workers into symbols of suffering. These are highly skilled individuals capable of reading balance, weight, measurement, and spatial harmony with astonishing precision using only basic handmade tools. Their knowledge is tactile and embodied. Pitik-Pitik is a tribute not only to construction workers in Masbate, but to an entire sector whose contributions are visible everywhere yet acknowledged nowhere. Roads, structures, and cities rise because of them, yet their labor remains temporary, unstable, and invisible once the structure is complete. Valdemoro reverses that invisibility as he places them on pedestals, granting them a presence historically reserved for saints, heroes, and rulers. And perhaps that is Pitik-Pitik’s sharpest indictment: that nation-building has always rested on the backs of people whose names history cannot be bothered to remember, whose skilled and calloused hands keep the country from collapsing even as news of millions-filled maletas and corruption seeps through every stratum of society like rot through a hollow structure.