'YOU CANNOT REST YOUR EYES': JIGGER CRUZ HAS A MID-CAREER RETROSPECTIVE

First came the exorcist of oil.

- SCOTT GARCEAU

Curator Norman Crisologo, Jigger Cruz and Met special exhibitions and projects consultant Bambina Olivares Tube Mountain The green "portal"

As Jigger Cruz walks us through “Hail Holy Eyes,” his mid-career show at Metropolitan Museum of Manila, we are reminded of this early desire to purge. To clear the air of imagined or real demons. To excise and defile, even. Figurative works peek out from the corners beneath thick slabs of oil paint overlaying canvases like entrails speaking in tongues. The “old school” beneath is there to remind us of what needs to be overturned, cast out, replaced or reimagined. The colonial cloak of the west.

The simple act of “defiance and defacement” was necessary for Cruz, born 1984 in Malabon City, Manila. Even the frames, he points out, are an anachronism he’s consciously rejected.

Yes, as in an early work titled “Broken Sunday,” where a melting rainbow dissolves the upper frame, flowing and consuming the work beneath. “I remember that painting, when I was doing that was a time when, walang gawan paint, if you put a frame, it’s already old school, it’s not contemporary,” he recalls. “So I destroyed it. I wanted to make an annoying painting.”

Provocation can get you noticed, but it won't take you that far on its own. Cruz developed a unique relationship with paint, particularly his beloved oils. Being colorblind, unable to distinguish purple and green tints, meant he evolved a more textural approach to the canvas, applying thick layers directly from tubes. Consuming the past. Worming and tunneling into the now.

His curator and friend, Norman Cristologo, accompanies our tour. In the earlier work, he notes, Jigger’s figurative layers reveal not a repurposed painting, but something he painted then “destroyed.” “The background is action, then I remove the layers,” says Cruz. “It makes the background a sort of abstraction.”