Ronnie Lazaro: Despite The Boatman

by Cesare Syjuco

Published in: San Juan [The Liberated Bimonthly Magazine of Art], March 1985

(I)

I have never seen “The Boatman”. To his credit as a friend, however, Ronnie did phone me once or twice to inquire if Jean Marie and I were in the least bit interested in seeing it. He could arrange for tickets, he assured us, but wisely never pressed the point. And circumstances being as they were at the time, with a pair of upcoming exhibitions and a hundred-and-forty-hour working week to contend with, the film’s already overextended engagement at the Manila Film Center had run out on us before his calendar and ours could be simultaneously cleared.

The knots in our collective schedules had become hopelessly entangled by the time “The Boatman” had been recalled by the ECP for a second limited engagement. But true to his promise made many months before, Ronnie dutifully phoned us still another time to inquire about the feasibility of seeing the movie together.

“Ano ba, pare? Manonood ba tayo?” he had asked me somewhat sheepishly at 2 o’clock in the morning.

“Ikaw, pare...dapat ba tayong manood?” I had asked from my end, hoping for a reprieve.

“Hindi naman, pare. Alam mo na siguro ‘yon,” he had said, obviously quite relieved himself.

And that was that for “The Boatman”.

We never spoke of it again.

(II)

It’s funny. Because I must be the only one in Manila who doesn’t immediately think of Ronnie Lazaro as an actor. Mention Ronnie and I remember one of the most intuitively talented visual artists I have ever known. And I know some very good ones.

Ronnie doesn’t think of painting, only of mangling images and littering surfaces. He works completely by feel, propelled by passion, which only fails him whenever he distrusts it. His series of lightweight constructions on paper and wood, his “pile collages” of 1980 and 1981, are so compelling and provocative that I have found myself referring to them time and again in my own work. Ronnie has tremendous power as a painter, though he seldom, if ever, uses paint. His materials are disarmingly simple, but his use of them is ruthless and almost always unrestrained. Consider his signature piece entitled “Up Your Nose With A Rubber Hose”, a virtual cause celebre at the 1982 AAP Annual, and which was comprised entirely of black cotton buds pasted loosely on a clinically white surface. In all my years as an artist, I have yet to see anything more ugly. Or more potent. Ronnie Lazaro is, on impulse, what I have to labor day and night at becoming, and I am among the best there is.

————

His homespun proficiency as a sculptor is matched only by his breakneck inventiveness as a performance artist.

————

Ronnie doesn’t know shit from patatas about the garbage that goes into the making of fine photographs. Ronnie probably wouldn’t know a fine photograph if you were to rub one in his face. But his pictures, many of them taken with instamatic cameras and borrowed SLR’s, are only too expert at piercing the emulsion and lodging themselves in the gut. His series of 76-X snapshots, dubbed “Faces of the Famous”, was, in fact, the only photographic work selected to represent the country in the prestigious exhibition of One Hundred Living Filipino Painters and Printmakers held in Beijing, China, in 1981. The controversy that surrounded the inclusion of that work — selected in a system of “blind judging” at a time when Ronnie Lazaro was just another starving young artist — is sadly indicative of the great emphasis placed by our local art community on the classical concept of “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” And Ronnie’s pictures are never pretty. It is of interest to note that his recent photo exhibition at the Penguin Gallery was taken down after barely a week on display, a direct result of the public outcry to replace them with more wholesome and agreeable images.

But over and above his wholesale flirtations with the various forms of graphic representation made available to him through the years, Ronnie Lazaro is truly in his element when working in three and four dimensions. His homespun proficiency as a sculptor - a knack that is readily apparent in his work with barbed wire and dimestore mannequins - is matched only by his breakneck inventiveness as a performance artist. And in the utilization of his physical self as the transmitter for his creative impulses, Ronnie has virtually no equal. He literally commands attention whenever he is at his best. Which is not necessarily all the time. But which is more often than most people give him credit for.

(III)

I am a fan of Ronnie Lazaro. Despite "The Boatman". And for all my bellyaching about his prowess in fields of endeavour closer to my own heart, I recognize in him the eerie, almost hypnotic celluloid presence of a truly gifted cinematic actor. And yes, that too.

Some years back, Jack Sotto and I had penned the structure for a short film that was to have starred Ronnie Lazaro in the role of the ico. The closing scene was to have had him garbed in the heavy lenten robes of the Black Nazarene, mouthing these closing lines only moments before diving, fully clothed, into Raul Gonzalez's swimming pool:

"HOY, MGA ULOLI.

AKO SI HESUKRISTO.

HINDI AKO UNGGOY.

HINDI AKO TSONGGO...

* * *