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ABOARD
the slowest boat bound to Boracay, a young long-haired
abstract painter-performance artist was lazily cutting
his nails—hands and feet—with a silver nailcutter. He
was seated on a rusty metal chair permanently attached
to an open-air portion of the uppermost deck. There’s
something strangely audibly delightful, almost jazzy
about the tick-tick sound of the nailcutter and the
strong waves crashing on the turtle ship’s rusty
exterior.
Ronaldo
Ruiz was then on his way to a sailboat painting
competition already ongoing in the island-paradise. It
was sponsored by a government agency, with the usual
theme about saving the ocean from pollution,
industrialization, commercialization and all the other “tions.”
It’s easy to come up with the images, and the cash prize
was better than in other competitions, part of which was
a trip to Johannesburg.
But
there’s a problem because he and a handful of fellow
visual artists from Metro Manila were late, having
missed the earlier boat that would bring them to Boracay
in time for the start of the contest.
Ruiz
knew this the moment he boarded the ship. After all, he
told us later, it was not the competition he was
concerned about. It’s more of the experience of creating
something new. It’s the delight of joining, even though
there was only a slim chance of winning. And what are
contests anyway but an affirmation from preselected
judges, whose choices vary as time passes by. Real art,
Ruiz believes, need not be confined to the views of a
few “experts.”
This was
sometime in 2002. At the time, Ruiz was already twice
awarded with the Jurors’ Choice at the Art Association
of the Philippines’ annual competition, also twice with
the Jurors’ Choice at the Philip Morris Philippine Art
Awards, and the Best Entry in the AAP Centennial
Painting Competition.
In 2003
he was given something more relevant than such
affirmation. He was chosen as one of the recipients of
the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ 13 Artists
Awards. He went on to holding solo exhibits, including
the much-celebrated Refreshed at SM Megamall’s Art
Center. In the local art scene, holding a solo show in
that coveted venue is pretty much a signal moment,
declaring that the artist had already made it. One has
truly arrived.
Water
and metal. Nature and industrialization. These themes
continue to emerge in Ruiz’s new works. In one of his
many solo exhibits, he salvaged motherboards and CPUs
from an electronics shop’s garbage bin. He creatively
mounted them on canvas and painted strong colors over
them. The results were images of buildings as viewed
from above, enveloped in smog. Think of Google Earth
zooming in on highly industrialized cities. Other
paintings had green-colored abaca leaves mounted on
canvas, representing various elements of nature.
Ruiz, a
fine-arts graduate from the University of the East,
experienced early on working in the, uh, Middle East, to
build a house for his parents, siblings and his own
family. These experiences of being an OFW were made
evident in his earliest shows, which had figurative
renditions of humans tucked inside traveling bags.
When he
returned to the
Philippines,
he “served time” as a store-display artist for a few
local clothing apparel companies to make ends meet.
Eventually, he gave up the usual 9-to-5 grind and chose
to become a full-time artist.
As fate
would have it, Ruiz’s artworks developed from figurative
to abstract to something “off-canvas.” He became one of
the founding members and convenor of Tupada, a group of
performance artists that has performed, besides the
Philippines, in Tokyo, Sydney and Bangkok.
In his
last exhibit for 2007, Ruiz combined installation art
with the traditional canvas(ed) opus. He titled the
exhibit e-conversations. Again, Ruiz tackled how
technology affected ecology. That may sound rather
prosaic but Ruiz was able to transform the usual “dead
trees, denuded forests, dead environment” into an
engaging visual reminder that something must be done.
Now, for his latest solo exhibit, his 18th, Ruiz returns
to abstract, the basic and simple.
At The
Drawing Room
is digital intervention, ongoing until February 6.
Surprisingly, Ruiz eschews the multicolored,
multilayered, multidesigned canvases. No more
motherboards, abaca leaves, installations and the
recurrent black baby dolls.
In his
13 large artworks, done in acrylic, the black grayish
strokes and dips on the white canvases obviously reflect
the fluidity and unpredictability of nature. Each
artwork has a recurrent long white rectangle paired with
a red square, representing anything digital. On closer
viewing, the digital imagery calms and unifies the
series.
Ruiz
talks about balance, the yin and yang of modern age in
harmony with something permanent like nature. To our
untrained eyes, the now crew-cut Ruiz simply expounds on
the same concerns of environmentalists, preaching about
the slow death of our planet due to climate change.
At The
Drawing Room, we are reminded again of that young
long-haired visual artist cutting his nails (how he
managed to bring a nailcutter in a Boracay-bound
vacation remains a puzzle) aboard the slowest rocky boat
in the universe, 17 hours all the way to an
island-paradise, hoping to make it to a thematic contest
that he didn’t intend to win.
All
along, he knew it was about the journey, never the
destination. It’s the artwork, not the cash prize.
* The
Drawing Room is at
1007 Metropolitan Avenue,
Metrostar Building, Makati City. The telephone numbers
are 897-7877 and 897-6990. |
