Jose Tence Ruiz
Prancing About Artifice
By Eileen Legaspi - Ramirez
Jose Tence Ruiz's most recent suite of his now arguably signature corseted ballroom-goth denizens come conscripted in a choreographed frolic through defeat and demise.
With this sonorous reprise laced in a cotillion metaphor apparently standing-in for an eerie coming-of-age tale, we find this particularly un-cheery public coming-out party sullied by a patent fraying at the seams, referencing doomsday scenarios prefiguring globalized fossil fuel dystopia?of sinking artificial islands built up as grey landfills packing massed debris of industrial largesse.
As in most of Ruiz's pieces from this and associated assemblings of his paintings as well as keenly calculated performances and installations, Kotilion reeks of a malodorous visual denouement, what the artist presages as alternately "bracing for impact" or as "means of buying time/escape," or a "method of lasting" through a perpetual onslaught of crises?man-made and otherwise.
The ominous scent trail visibly comes in measured doses, from subtly poetic to heavy-handedly didactic?the series being an extended working through of both artistic and polemic preoccupations ringing through Ruiz's practice over the past years since he re-established himself in the Philippines after taking up the expat-techpen route in Singapore.
Taken together, Kotilion's frivolously sashaying characters do so to a dissonant waltz, in a macabre beating in time evoking the performative gestures of scowling dance directors brandishing iconically ominous clubs upon cowering lambient extremities gesticulating missteps.
Curiously, this wily pageant of ruse peopled by: the Ophelia tandem?Ophelia with Sports Utility Bomb and Homage to Milais's Ophelia; Bungeefixion; and the bluescreen-laden Ocean of Virtuality pieces; is not entirely underhanded given the none so subtle references to a transgeneration retinue of pop star figures (Sharon Cuneta, Gloria Romero, Kris Aquino, Nikki Gil, and Angel Locsin literally present in magazine cut-outs strewn across Ruiz's studio). Such are the tongue-in-cheek jabs this artist throws to suggest the way crafted myths on tubes and screen outgloss our collective tragedies, palliatively assuaging looming fears of impending stunted debuts.
For despite his own pronouncements of his country turning into a mere amalgam of mercenary economic zones--where any real opportunities to make things come dissipated by lazy cop-outs to merely assemble or transit goods?despite the nagging presence of literal and metaphorical carcasses of human flesh, Ruiz still vaguely suggests the possibility of comeuppance such as in his adroit parody of Aquino's cosmetic and wide-spanning product endorsements. And just as his bluescreen comes with tight associations of homogenized blockbuster cinematic excess, its semiotic flipside comes as blank projective ground?a blank surface that potentially takes upon itself stinging critique as easily as it does the campiness of virtual reality fictions spun by technocrat soothsayers.This trope of detritus masking the possible as well as the intractable congeals in Ruiz's remade work Ophelia with Sports Utility Bomb, where we find our heroine lounging in a junkyard padded with a patent class slant, of abandoned footwear unmistakenly casting one into type.
Thus this dance of desolation, while characteristically sullen, leaves quarter for a middling hope, says the artist himself: "It would have to be an ability to distance from seduction, an ability to kick-float furiously awash in a tsunami of sensation never before offered for seemingly so little. This elevation of despair into applied determination may be the stroke needed to metaphorically stay afloat in the deluge of dissipation which has unavoidably begun to flood in." (Ruiz, Ctrl+p, Determined Despair 2007)
As in the proverbial DI for hire, Ruiz seems to pose and pause, still bidding for individual agency in this grave "ocean of virtuality and speculation".
Works by this artist:
Tango Benigno
64.75 x 48.75 inches
Acrylic on Canvas (092)
2006
Blu Skreen Kotillion
7 ft 10 inches x 6 ft
Oil on Canvas
2008
Kotillion 1: Sinking in the Sea of the Virtual
6 x 4 feet
Oil on Canvas
2008
Kotillion 3: Carnage Drowns in an Ocean of Virtuality
6 x 4 feet
Oil on Canvas
2008
Kotillion in Ecru: A Rising Tide of Virtuality
5 x 4 feet
Oil on Canvas
2008
H2O: Homage to Millais\' Ophelia
5 ft 2 inches x 6 ft 9 inches
Oil on Canvas
2008
BunJeez!!
6 ft 9 inches x 5 ft 2 inches
Oil on Canvas
2008
BungeeFixion
4 x 4 ft
Oil on Canvas
2008
KConcepcion Immaculada: Por Juice Y Por Santo
4 x 3 feet
Oil on Canvas
2008
Oil on Canvas 2004 - 2008">
Ophelia with Sports Utility Bomb
4 x 5ft 10\"
Oil on Canvas
2004 - 2008
Usama Bin Santa
3 x 2 feet
Oil on Canvas
2007
Opening Night
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July 31, 2008
Bogie, Amor, Gus (Kotillion Opening Night)
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Aquilizan and Rochit (Kotillion Opening Night)
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July 31, 2008
Opening Night
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July 31, 2008
Opening Night
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July 31, 2008
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photograph taken by Dr. Rico Quimbo
2008
Bagahe
Wood, Urea Formaldehyde Resin, Acrylic, Alumi
Winner of the 52nd AAP Grand Prize for Sculpt
Kariton Katedral: Kambal Dos
Wood, Bitumen, Enamel, Acrylic, Metal, Rubber
2004
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