Silverlens presents “The Carbon Footprint of the Stoic Heroic,” a solo exhibition by Jose Tence Ruiz, showcasing mixed media works and self-portraits from the late 1970s alongside new works on canvas, a large installation that spans almost the entire large gallery space, and another depicting the artist’s body in the small gallery.
With an artistic practice that spans over 50 years, Tence Ruiz is a foremost practitioner of the Philippine social realist movement. Whether as a painter or a political cartoonist, his approach has been defined by a contempt for the cruelties and hypocrisies of Philippine society and a deep respect for the struggles of ordinary people. In 2015, his large-scale installation, Shoal, was exhibited at the Philippine Pavilion: Tie A String Around the World, at the 56th Venice Biennale. This marked the Philippines’ return to the prestigious biennial after a 51-year absence.
In “The Carbon Footprint of the Stoic Heroic,” Tence Ruiz reappropriates religious iconography and Mondrian’s geometric abstractions to produce new visual metaphors for his current thematic preoccupations: disillusionment, genocide, and the death of utopia. There is a total of nine new works in the show, the centerpiece of which is a large mixed media installation of a baptismal font encircled by a circular queue of several hundred empty water containers, resembling a living rosary and evoking a perverse litany. The painting after which the show is titled, in addition to three others, utilizes Mondrian’s visual language to symbolize the degradation of utopia and the disillusionment that has haunted the artist in a time of genocide.
In the smaller gallery is a series of self-portraits, four of which were produced in the 1970s and 1980s, which culminate in a new installation of the artist’s body modeled in resin, reclining in a massage chair and drowning underneath a mass of black cable wires, illustrating the tragic inertia of life in the digital age and demonstrating the ability to turn sharp social commentary into striking visual metaphor that has served Tence Ruiz for the last 50 years.
“The Carbon Footprint of the Stoic Heroic” is on view from 17 October to 16 November at Silverlens Manila, 2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati City.