'Don't fall in love with TV celebrities'
Photos and Interview by Melvyn Calderon | 11/02/2009 11:59 AM
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Bogie Ruiz takes on the Media
Are they as benign as angels, or a dangerous lot? Will they forever remain in every man’s dream, or are they as real as the events they cover?
Jose Tence “Bogie” Ruiz—painter, illustrator, activist at heart—is putting up a compelling narrative of artwork featuring prominent TV news anchors and the issues attached to them. He put a playful title to it: “Wag Ma-Inlab sa Tao sa TV.”
“It is a carry-through of many concerns I’ve nurtured,” said the 53-year-old Ruiz who became a painter at the age of 18 and spent many years as well as an editorial illustrator in various local and foreign newspapers such as the defunct Manila Chronicle and the Singapore Straits Times.
“Politics, media, [it’s] the everyman’s crush on mesmerizing beauties on the Google box, their ubiquity and unattainability—at least as far as I’m concerned,” Ruiz says. “It’s also about war, peace, the evening news,” he adds, glancing at ABS-CBN news anchor and reporter Ces Oreña Drilon—or at least his image of her—in an imposing painting.
Ruiz’s solo exhibit on Nov. 15 at the Kaida Galleries in Quezon City follows a successful, sold-out show in July this year, titled “Kotillion” and held at Art Informal in Greenhills, San Juan.
“As always, I’m inspired by the complexities of being alive. What I used to articulate these complexities, the contradictions, the inequities, the ironies, the beauty and disgust was a set of troupes. One troupe was to render popular and beautiful women in Kotillion Gowns. The gowns reflected absurd power and a bricolage of specific imagery like a gown made of driftwood, a gown made of slabs of raw meat, a gown made of exploded jeepney parts and in my Homage to Ophelia, a gown made of product endorsements related to one very popular TV Host.”
To him, social realism simply means having to grapple with the complexities of modern existence. “It can’t get more interesting than looking hard at humans and their politics and their interactions and their drama and finding some personal way to sum this up for me and the time I was alive. This is a vexing job, for sure, but I wouldn’t have any other.”
In his everyday work environment, Ruiz tries to correct the very inequities that he denounces in his art. For instance, he shares his earnings from his artwork with his craftsmen, giving them a stake in each painting that he makes.
“If my work probed environmental degradation, then in my daily life I owe it to myself to actually live according to these insights," he explains. “If in my work, I confronted inequities that were political or economic, I am compelled to be commonsensically and politically fair in my dealings, both with people close to me as well as those that are part and parcel of a larger cosmopolitan community.”
Ruiz says he finds socialism a useful concept—“but only if I were also willing to abide by its germane self-deprecation.” By now, he adds, “I’m convinced that that is a small price to pay for some personal equilibrium.”
The landscape that constantly inspires his art has certainly changed over the years, and Ruiz knows the key to staying alive as an artist it to keep on learning.
“One is not alive if not adjusting and evolving,” he admits. He says he didn’t feel compelled to “stylize” in the face of authenticity.
“Social realism as it was in the 1970s has had to evolve. It could not stay doctrinaire. It could stiffen up and be ridiculous. Like all vital activities, adaptation is key to its continuity.”
For in the end, life continues to be compelling. And so does Ruiz’s work.
(Catch Ruiz’s “WAG Ma-Inlab Sa Tao Sa TV,” Kaida Galleries, Quezon City, Nov. 15, 2009. The gallery is located at 26 Sct. Torillo cor. Sct. Fernandez, Diliman, Quezon City. For inquiries, call 441-0032; mobile: +639285057285 )
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