http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/01232008/life04.htmlRONALDO RUIZ’S Digital Intervention series
By Totel V. de Jesus
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.
