Art-light versus life's unbearable darkness, according to Jose Tence Ruiz
By FILIPINA LIPPI
January 16, 2012, 9:14am
(Photo by Pinggot Zulueta)
MANILA, Philippines — Philippines’ post-modern social realist artist Jose “Bogie” Tence Ruiz has declared art’s impotence over life but he refuses to give up art as a form of expression because he believes that an artist – armed with philosophy and visions – can “continue documenting, commenting and meditating” and in the process stop the unbearable darkness of being.
The tectonics of his despair over life’s tragic stillness and downhill trend, compounded by art’s lack of strength to stop the rush of things, despite the shrill anger, early warnings and the ‘I told you so’ that came from social realist artists like him and his peers from the '70s to the '80s -- when they head-butted on the dialectical clashes between the rich and the poor, the oppressor and the oppressed, the (post) colonials and the (post) colonized -- has reached to a boiling point (after 36 years of art-making), that he would be expected to repudiate (in art, at least) several symbols of superstructure like Christ, church and powerful women that have enlivened his art works since the early 2000.
In a show entitled "Desiccated Proxy" at Galleria Duemila in Pasay City , which started on January 7 and will end on February 29, Ruiz seemed decisive, meticulous, philosophical to say good-bye to his chosen symbols of superstructures. With his signature style of parody, no other post-modern social realist artist in the Philippinestoday has reached the capability to dramatize a scalding environment in art that can move viewers and sweep them off their feet towards action (or anger about life’s challenges).
Read full article at http://mb.com.ph/node/348226/artlight-ver.
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