Jose ‘the other’ Legaspi Young Master of An Art in Torment
Jose ‘the other’ Legaspi
Young Master of An Art in Torment
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, December 03, 1988
BE very still as you enter the pristine white chamber that houses artist Jose Legaspi’s memorable solo exhibition at the far-flung Kulay-Diwa Art Galleries in Parañaque. Stifle the startled wimper or the ghosts in their slumbering hell will awaken. For the time-being at least, they are lulled in the hush of our neglect, lying dormant but not quite dead — exceedingly dangerous when roused. In this terminal rot, we have quieted them with merciful opiates, and still, they turn in a fitful sleep. Know, also, that these are the artist’s secret bedmates, and that the young Jose Legaspi — the uncrowned prince of the New Figuration — suffers the most painful affliction of all: an advanced cancer of the soul.
The transplanted tomb and its winged sentinel will fill you with instant terror as it did me. Cast from life (or death?) with slash-cornered papier maché at the city’s traditional burial grounds in La Loma, they stand here gruesomely out of context like a sudden vision of our own mortality, blanketed white-on-white with finely-powdered chalk. A single rose lies mute on the raised vault’s belly, wailing tender songs of a lost love. But the tenderness is deceptive; drawn here like flies to the bittersweet, we stand at the farthest end of the chamber and then realize our carelessness. The tomb and the angel both are an oasis in hell, and the real demons are loose in this room.
For instance, directly opposite the mock burial site is a pitch-black coal pit where a man’s charred remains lie not quite buried, struggling with face and an outstretched hand against the oppressive weight, the pave and pull of barren waste. This, then, is the artist’s shadow, languishing in a half-death, craving perpetuity or extinction, laboring to the whip of “both” and “neither”. All men live in half-shadow (the shadow of death), even as they die in half-light (the light of immortality), fulfilling their only real destiny by going to their graves. Legaspi, maimed young master of an art in torment, bathes in this existential exuberance precisely because it is his natural element. And this artist, like all so-called terminal patients, has learned well to channel suffering into atonement, paying for his sins with pain.
A suite of his drawings, 30 in number and stacked edge-to-edge on one wall, shows clearly that Legaspi’s sins of passion are many. As such, his pain is the language of his romance. It has been said, not entirely above whispers, that young Legaspi’s macabre exhibit was inspired by “the ritual death” of an intimate friend — an equally-young Japanese poet named Kazushi whose name is inscribed in the art, and whose supposed likeness is enshrined in a thorn- enmeshed altar as the proverbial Christ-figure. No one in the gallery can tell you with any certainty if this torrid love-object is actually dead, or if he now shares the artist’s sense of twilight demise. I suspect that if the artist himself were there, he would know the answer least of all. Far too often, artists of rabid intellect have been known to crown their fictions, if only because their realities exist separately from ours. And were Jose Legaspi entirely sane, we could doubt his integrity and question his vile transgressions.
As it is, Legaspi, in his most transparent outing yet, persists as perhaps our brightest hope to a potent new figuration, his twisted renderings in charcoal and pastel shining through this dark foray into the installational. It is far too easy for anyone to paint angst and turmoil with credible conviction, and the current market trends favor hysteria as the subject of choice. Jose Legaspi makes nearly everyone else working in the genre look like emotional and intellectual dwarfs, which they almost certainly are, because they lack the poetry of scars and the dementia of a mind feverish with hellfire. Love lost to ritual death? Or a death lost to ritual love? They intermingle like soiled fragrances.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Jose ‘the other’ Legaspi Young Master of An Art in Torment” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, December 03, 1988
