{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":59851,"auction_id":186,"set_id":220,"lot_number":"136","artist":"Jigger Cruz (b. 1984)","title":"Untitled","starting_price":2200000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2014 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"65 1/4\" x 77 1/4\" (166 cm x 196 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Meditations of Jigger Cruz Manila’s Young Maverick\n\nI n his 2025 ArtCritic article entitled ‘Jigger Cruz: Cover, erase, be born,’ Hervé Lancelin described Jigger Cruz’s fascinating art practice as an “aggressive archeology.” One look at his oeuvre proves the art critic right\n\nHowever, a deeper look offers a much-appreciated layer that creates a completely new branch of thinking. Beneath the multitude of oil and spray paint is another painting – a copy of the works of Flemish masters and Renaissancestyle portraits that lie near forgotten at the bottom of the canvas.\n\nTo best understand Cruz’s chaotic canvases, one must return to the colonial and postcolonial history of the Philippines. He echoes the paradox of many great Filipino artists: how can the colonized create when the very tools one must use belong to the colonizer? What should one create – should they conform to the Greater West’s standards of perspective and painting?\n\nCruz gave his answer to this longstanding question. By obliterating the academic paintings before him, he refuses to acknowledge the question. He does not seek to disprove or approve such a notion; instead, he calls this very question irrelevant.\n\nThis aggressive archeology of his is no simple task. Artist Manuel Ocampo, with whom Cruz was an assistant many years ago, says this in Trickie Lopa’s Vogue PH article entitled ‘For Contemporary Artist Jigger Cruz, Creation Begins With Destruction’: “Contrary to his soft-spoken nature, Jigger’s works are very violent: the gestures, the strong movement, the thickly applied paint.”\n\nThis 2014 work embodies that violent nature of creation. Cruz poses the philosophical question of creative destruction; as such, this work, like many in his oeuvre, both maintains and erases the old. In contrast to the Western notion of fully erasing abstract works from any external surface, Cruz deliberately maintains that tension between destruction and construction.\n\nJigger Cruz’s works force the viewers to rethink the relationships between the center and the periphery of global contemporary art. As Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay wrote in ‘A Mark from the Periphery’: “The painting is a text; it speaks, and its message can be interpreted, among other things, as the reification of a series of cultural and political truths. Its very existence is a proclamation, and thus a provocation…Cruz’s mark making speaks, too, but not as a lone voice. Rather, it speaks over and against the discourse that is responsible for its marginalization. His peripheral painting moves from outside the frame onto the canvas in order to interrupt and transform dominant art-historical discourse.” (Hannah Valiente)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":3400000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":3400000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":15699,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":4085440,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":65345,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/186/220/lot/136.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":65587,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/186/220/lot/136b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":65586,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/186/220/lot/136a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":135,"next":137,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}