The Relevant and Irreverent Jose Tence Ruiz
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Portrait of Jose Tence Ruiz from the Crown Series. Photo by Angelo Valmoria Roxas.
“I always believed that none of those guys wanted to go. These guys had a lot of life force,” he says, musing that “all of these things you have been imagining for yourself, you better start executing for yourself.”
These reflections produced Litanya, a compilation of his life’s work over a span of 59 years. His body of work is so vast that this inventory, which has nearly 650 paintings, sculptures, installations, and performances, excludes a few thousand illustrations for which he was praised by critic Alice Guillermo as having “set new standards in illustration as an art form.”
Litanya 1972-2022
The Works of Jose Tence Ruiz
Written by Jose Tence Ruiz
Book Design, Cover Design and InDesign Layout by Jose Tence Ruiz
Published in Quezon City, Philippines by Jose Tence Ruiz
Copyright 2022
Jose Tence Ruiz
ISBN 978-621-06-0350-7
The book chronicles his rise as an artist from when he was a student of the painter Brenda Fajardo, who held small art contests that were attended by Raul Isidro and Roberto Chabet. She accompanied Tence Ruiz to the 1972 Thirteen Artists Awards at the Cultural Center, where he first encountered the work of the late Mario Parial. It includes works from his first solo exhibition, in 1985, which was attended by some of the wealthiest collectors at the time and yet sold nothing.
When I ask Tence Ruiz, otherwise known as Bogie, to tell the story, he says, “I was given three big galleries to fill, I did 27 big works for three years, I showed for an entire month.” He presses his thumb to his forefinger. “That’s the total amount of sales I made after all that shitty effort. I think was crying for three days straight.” Eventually, his wife, Rochit, said, “Maghanap ka ng trabaho. Tatlong araw na (Better look for a job; it’s been three days),” and he found himself at the Manila Times working as a political cartoonist.
Tence Ruiz describes his work as artistic journalism, a sub-genre of social realism informed by the journalistic work that was “the livelihood that I had until I could finally not need a livelihood and I could live off art.” Much like his work at newspapers, Tence Ruiz’s output as an independent artist aims to reflect the oppressive conditions of life in the Philippines. His reason being, “the times we live in are both unique and repeated. They belong to cycles that people have been doing since monarchical times.”
One cycle that has occurred in the span of his 50-year career is the Marcos restoration, beginning with the burial of Marcos Sr. at Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery), an event that disgusted him so thoroughly that it inspired his 2017 series, “Libangan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Pastime).” The paintings depict national heroes, whom he calls “Andres Bonifuckyou” and “Juan Luha,” whose faces have been erased to resemble the destroyed Marcos monument in Benguet. He says, “I don’t know how to be angry, I want to be just really disgusted, to the point na people ask, ‘Why did you destroy the heroes?’ But what does it mean to be a hero anymore? What kind of world are we in?”
Libangan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Pastime): Pepe, Boni, oil and enamel on Canvas diptych, 2017 (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Political chicanery in the Philippines provides him with endless opportunities to make the art he makes. “Bakit hindi ka gagawa ng art sa Pilipinas? Mabubuwang ka ‘pag hindi ka gumawa ng art sa Pilipinas, (Why not make art in the Philippine? You’ll go crazy if you don’t)” he tells me. ”It just pours out; it comes out of me. I wake up in the morning, I say I have to extrude that shit from my consciousness and put it somewhere. Doesn’t mean that people care about it, but it’s there. It’s there for me.”
Perhaps one reason Tence Ruiz is so prolific is because Philippine society never ceases to provide him with new objects of disgust and ridicule. One target of his ire is the Philippine upper class, which he mocks in his “Kotillion” series: portraits of doñas and señoras dressed like Marie Antoinette. “I struggled to say, how does one else reflect the frustration with the Philippines and who the hell is to blame? Maybe I’ll come across as an ingrate leftist or whatever,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s elites who are to blame, because they accumulate more and more and more and there’s just no surplus distributed.”
Tence Ruiz has no illusions about the relationship between artists and the art-ownership class, which allows him to acknowledge the conflict of being commercially successful social realist: “Here’s the funny thing,” he tells me. “And yet you want to sell the work. You’re playing with this possibility of an ornamental input to a totally bleak vision, and you hope that they don’t get the bleak vision before they get the ornament. One has got to play that little gambit, it’s a real gambit, hindi mo rin alam kung may kakagat eh (You don’t know if you’ll get a bite.)” The “Kotillion” paintings ended up selling out; it remains his most popular series. I wonder whether some buyers resemble the objects of the artist’s contempt, and if there is anyone Tence Ruiz will refuse to sell to.
He tells me the story of the time he received a text from his art dealer, who told him that someone really wanted a “Kariton Katedral.” That person turned out to be a former president’s daughter, to which he replied a quick “No thanks.” Though he draws a line, Tence Ruiz acknowledges that, after a certain point, the artist cedes control. “If my work got a tertiary sale and it landed with them, that’s the life of the work,” he tells me. “Can you imagine all of the Nazis who got all the masterpieces? What can we do? The guys who made all the masterpieces never intended them to be in the collection of the Nazis, or even the more aggressive capitalists. That’s the nature of the beast.”
There is a longstanding tension between artists and the people who patronize their work, a silent agreement not to bite the hand that feeds, that is especially obvious when artists and their patrons find themselves on opposing sides of political struggles. Artists have always been aware of these contradictions; Tence Ruiz is frank about it. I ask him if the art market undercuts the purpose of his work, and he says, soberly, “It always will. It always will.”
“We have this figment of our hopeful imagination that we want to say, I want this to live in the consciousness of my community,” he says. “Usually, it never will until some rich collector puts it in some famous place that has been built on the sweat and blood of a lot of poor people.” Nevertheless, he insists that the artist must make the work, that the work has to exist, before thinking of what comes after.
Last July, he attended a conference in Iloilo where someone asked him, “How can you still do things in the age of auctions and super-inflated prices?” He answered, “How did the Polynesians get to Hawaii when the ocean, like big capital, could have eaten them up every day? Sabi ko, most curatorial people like the word ‘navigate’; it’s the best word. Especially in the age of capitalism. The ocean eats you up inevitably just like capital will eat all of us up, and yet, some of us will survive the ocean and found a new civilization. Kailangan mo munang lumusong, period. Kung hindi ka willing lumusong, nothing (You need to wade in, but if you’re not willing nothing will come of it).”
Tence Ruiz strikes me as a reluctant pragmatist who, I sense, feels a bit sorry for those who are less pragmatic. In his youth, he would drive his siblings to schools in Quezon City and see, every day, a cat that had been run over.
“Somebody told me that they freeze in the headlights. When it’s dark and [the headlights] are really bright, they freeze and that’s why they get run over. I made it a metaphor for people who were idealistic; they get frozen in the middle of their conflict. These are the activists: they get frozen there, they stare at the light, and sometimes it cuts them down. It’s that attachment to some kind of idea.”
I ask him if he approaches his work as a designer and illustrator, work that he took on for the financial means to control his creative output, differently from the work he makes for himself. He answers in a roundabout way:
“The only thing you bring into a creative practice is personality. Who you are, how you were formed, your value system. Everything will flow from that. The appearance of your work will flow from that. It’s not so much style. That’s the substantial thing to put into art. Style can be contrived. The nice thing about a personality, you never escape it. A guy telling the truth never has to remember what he said the last time.
“The problem with me,” he adds, “is that I also bring that into all commissioned work. Therefore, what did I have to do? I had to find a place like the Manila Times.”
There, he met journalists Vergel Santos, Sheila Coronel, Rolly Fernandez, and Malou Mangahas and saw his personality reflected back at him. Tence Ruiz did try other jobs before landing at the Times. He taught at San Beda High School, but upon reviewing the contract, realized it forbade him from entering beer houses and massage parlors. He did not renew his contract.
He marvels at how he “survived” working in Singapore, where he learned to restrain his irreverence in exchange for the satisfaction of seeing the money in his bank account grow exponentially. On Sundays, he would spend time with Filipinos who worked as domestic helpers.
“One of their favorite stories is when customs people would take their time looking at the panties and bras. They would enjoy embarrassing them and making them feel powerless. Sabi ko (I thought), what’s a tribute to them? A rough suitcase very hard to carry made with panties and bras.” At the time, he says, there were “only 45,000” Filipino workers in Singapore, a number that has since inflated to an estimated 200,000.
Dayo, mixed media, 1993 (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Last December, Tence Ruiz received the Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi, granted by the Ateneo to those who have “succeeded in steering the national consciousness toward a clarification, development and enhancement of the essential Filipino image” through the arts. He is resistant to the idea of an event that requires him to wear a Barong Tagalog, and joked that they might rescind his award when they hear his acceptance speech.
I wonder what it means to Tence Ruiz, who brings up old age and obsolescence regularly in our conversation, to receive an award that usually marks the beginning of the end of a career. Six times, the award has been given posthumously.
We discuss his painting, “The Pro-Rated Wage of the Abang Guard,” in which David Medalla, Roberto Chabet, and Tang Da Wu are dressed as security guards.
The Pro-Rated Wage of the Abang Guard, oil on canvas, 2011 (Photo courtesy of the artist)
“As you grow older, you realize, it’s on your shoulders that everybody stood and then you get buried up to your shoulders. You used to be avant-garde but now you’re just the abang (waiting) guard. You were the most compelling person in your prime, now, not so much,” he says. “That’s me, the painting is me reflecting on the fact that I am about to be obsolete. It’s a lamentation that we all expire.” It started in his fifties, when he was beginning to feel “every time I had a visitor, I said, are you really interested in talking to an obsolete person?”
He claims that even David Medalla, who received the Tanglaw ng Lahi in 2012, is fading into obscurity. I tell him I doubt this. “You try talking about David with thirtysomethings, they get lost. David, the bona fide genius, the real polyglot, the guy who could discuss aesthetics in Italian, French, German, whoever he faced,” he says. “That’s the point of all of us who live a salient life. We don’t matter after a certain point in time.”
In his book’s foreword, he writes that, in 1969, he nearly died in a car accident and has since “had a deep cognizance of the possibility of death, and of how thinking about it energizes one’s privilege to be alive.”
Most people would avoid discussing death so frankly, but Tence Ruiz seems to move towards it. There is a fascination with decay and the temporariness of things that guides him and his work. In a series he calls the “Derelict Penthouses,” he paints abandoned towers like specters, a reminder that nothing endures. “Eventually, they are all going to have to give into nature. You can build as many grand structures, but we will be extinct,” he says. “Time overtakes us and whatever vanity we bring into it, we have to question. Because eventually, you have to leave a more emotional, communal legacy with people.”
In spite of this preoccupation with death—or maybe because of it—Jose Tence Ruiz, like his contemporaries, still has plenty of what he calls “life force.” He asks me if I want to see the series he’s currently working on, which portrays the Makapili in ternos and Birkins instead of the traditional bayong (native palm bag). I ask, you’re making new work? “Of course! I’m still alive!” he exclaims. “I’m still alive.”
Retro Rampa: Neo Makapili in Blue Croc (September 2023) (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Despite his self-proclaimed obsolescence, and because he needs somewhere to “extrude the shit” that he encounters every day, Tence Ruiz continues to stage several exhibitions a year, relevant as ever, and I suspect, for many years to come.
Jose “Bogie” Tence Ruiz at the book launch of Litanya 1972-2022 (June 3, 2023)
Isabel Rodrigo is a researcher and cultural worker based in Manila.
