The ineffable Maria Cruz

Very few Filipino visual artists can rightfully claim to have international stature. And by international, I don’t just mean being transplanted from one’s homeland to practice art overseas, participating in regional art fairs, or exhibiting in one of these cultural pageants organized by our Philippine embassies.

To me, the true measure of success comes from the acknowledgment and respect accorded to our very own by the world’s most influential art institutions and art critics.

I will be the first one to say that I defy the hegemony of the so-called art centers of the West – in particular, New York, London, Berlin – in dictating the state of contemporary art. Who are they to say what’s hot, what’s not; it’s abstract today and figurative tomorrow? I’m all for defining our own direction in art making, and creating our own templates for quality. Yet how can one argue when a consensus is arrived at from different quarters – when accolades come flying left, right and center, and doors to coveted residencies and exhibition spaces swing wide open?

You can count these Filipino international art stars with one hand. At the head of the list, of course, is David Cortez Medalla, still the enfant terrible of Philippine art, whose name continues to resonate in contemporary art circles while he shuttles between giving talks at New York’s Guggenheim and directing the London Biennial.

Iwill never forget the time when I was asked in the course of my postgraduate studies in Sydney who the artists represented in our museum collection were. I rattled off the names of all of our National Artists, none of who even registered a blip on my professor’s pacemaker. I eventually mentioned Medalla’s name and, to my delight, his face finally lit up, only for me to be flummoxed by a riposte the dinosaur made: "David Medalla – wow, I didn’t even know that he was Filipino!"

Happily, over the past few years, I have been seeing newer talents curtsy to rapturous applause on the international stage: Lani Maestro, a Filipino-Canadian – cited for her silent yet eloquent installations – is a festival regular. Her Book Full of Ocean (1999) – a large and thick tome containing nothing but page upon page of photographs of the sea set on a simple desk surrounded by a sound montage of crashing waves still gives me goosebumps every time I think about it.

Paul Pfeiffer, a Filipino-American, and a recent visitor to our shores, has cast a similarly impressive net by figuring in the Whitney Biennial selection, and participating in the Venice Biennale with, let me just emphasize this – a truly respectable showing.

Perhaps the least known among our compatriots who have attained a truly international standing is the Filipino-Australian Maria Cruz, who very recently completed her Asialink artist-in-residence program at our museum, having just completed a project which involved her convening 30 of Australia’s leading young female visual artists to participate in her very own Shangri-la Collective installation at ArtSpace – now that’s influence – and most impressively, returning from a year-long stint at no less than the Museum of Modern Art New York’s contemporary art project space in Queens, PS1.

This is the third time that I am writing a rah-rah piece about Cruz’s work as she leaves for Berlin to undertake another residency, and deepen her knowledge of German in order to be more fully engaged in philosophical debates concerning her art. If only to emphasize how truly important it is for us to hold up artists of this caliber for emulation, I promise you that it won’t be the last time you’ll hear about her. God knows how badly we need people who can inspire us.

Here’s a review that I made some years back of one of her exhibitions:

Although the idea of interpreting a theme through the works of artists is hardly anything new, the same cannot be said when artists themselves become the starting point.

Maria Cruz’s Portia Geach prize-winning self-portrait "Maria" (1997) is an examination of the definition of the self "through both physical appearance and name." The painting shows her face gazing out from behind a screen of letters that spell out M-A-R-I-A in streaming sequence, obliterating portions of her visage as they weave through her skin and hair. In this way, "her superimposed name appears to both protect the artist/subject and to prevent the reality from being seen."

By coupling text and image, Cruz eloquently delves into the sheer indescribability of her essence. She adds: "When I look at my face in the mirror, it is just marks I see, and when I put my name in text on top of my face I think that you can then read into that painting many other things other than just myself."

"Maria" is a portrait of the self that goes beyond the narcissistic paean. The moniker alludes to Marian concepts of womanhood, whose inclusive implications the work appears to both embrace and reject. Cruz says: "Maria, it is such an ordinary name – it is almost a generic name, Maria. Yet there is a resonance there, I guess the feeling of ordinariness yet universality about it makes it really a very attractive name – it means everything and nothing."

The search for meaning extends to ideas about the transcendent. Beyond the realm of the self, Cruz approaches her textural study of painting as a process in which medium and substance are codified. From one perspective, her series "That Occult Metaphysical Quality of Gravity Nos. 5-14," characterized by dribbling dollops of oil and resin paint swathed in even horizontal monochrome bands across large-scale canvases, may be literally apprehended as illustrations of Newtonian physics. Her use of repeat forms, though, belies the work’s aseptic mien. The smart optical effect, on one hand, references metaphoric notions of mesmeric archetype symbols while, on the other, they bring to mind an earlier series of Cruz’s work (not in this exhibition) which illustrated "a classic Catholic categorization of the cosmos – orchestrated by a coding of the cadmium-yellow, green and red representing heaven, earth and hell respectively."

In so doing, Cruz projects her work into the ethers of the sublime, a realm bigger than herself, at the same time that she translates her own personal epistemology, giving credence to Sullivan’s comment: "Your history is your material."

This convergence of image and structure comes to a head in the form of what, at first, appears to be indeterminate decorative patterns. The liana, a tendril/curlicue similar to Cy Twombly’s free-form scribbles, appears in "Between Lies" (1989/90) as an enduring image in Cruz’s early work. Sullivan describes it as "the essential structure of organic growth" – a dynamic symbol of the relationship between culture and nature – and adds, "From the arabesque to the rose and the grapes of the Eucharist, an obsession with reworking traditional symbols of art historical, religious and general cultural significance goes beyond the specificity of reference to the automatic nature of such endeavor, the will to form, to continually rework and reclassify the familiar."

Cruz’s engagement with catalytic emblems consolidates her position as an artist engaged in the discourse of materiality in search of fundamentals. Ultimately, her works may be understood as a missive about art as a worthy vehicle for ineffability.

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For your feedback, e-mail rlerma@ateneo.edu.