{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":61701,"auction_id":209,"set_id":242,"lot_number":"125","artist":"Jigger Cruz (b. 1984)","title":"Untitled","starting_price":2400000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2014 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"48\" x 60\" (122 cm x 152 cm)","property":"","coa":"","provenance":"Private collection, Manila","exhibited":"","literature":"","write_up":"Cruz’s particular brand of abstraction is one of a tangible and tactile kind. Known for his thick gobs of oil paint, which he spatters, squeezes, and streaks across his massive canvases, the three-dimensional quality of his works physically demands attention. It looms large over its viewer, the overlapping layers of oil paint leaning heavy both literally and metaphorically.
Especially in his earlier works, Cruz rarely applies paint with a brush — he either squeezes them out straight from the tube, uses a painting knife to spread them across the canvas, or, for fine loops and coils, utilizes an icing bag and applies the paint, similar to a pâtissier with their baked goods.
Hailing from Malabon City, Cruz’s abstractions echo the town's hustle and bustle. “The abstraction that I do comes from my childhood, from my neighbourhood in Malabon,” he muses, as Bambina Olivares wrote in a 2025 Tatler article about the artist. “It was a typical Philippine baroque environment, you know, where it’s mix and match, using all colours that you can combine. It’s chaos, but for me, I find it more beautiful. It’s real, it’s honest, the streets, the noise, the laundry lines… There was no order.”
That chaos is evident in this 2014 piece. Just two years after his international debut at Prima Marella, his visual language rings clear and true in his long, deliberate paint strokes. A factoid many may not know about Cruz is that he is colorblind; thus, his sense of color is instinctual, freely used and unabashedly utilized. In lieu of this, his works are often more physical in nature, as he taps more into their more textural qualities rather than how they are defined in terms of hue, value, or saturation.
The canvases of Jigger Cruz argue for the place of defacement and destruction in the realm of art. With two paintings happening simultaneously in one canvas — a Classical painting buried underneath the “Philippine baroque” style vandalism — his works straddle between Western and local sensibilities. Hervé Lancelin described it best in his 2025 Jigger Cruz: Cover, erase, be born, where he said: “This pictorial stratigraphy functions as a metaphor for Philippine colonial history: Western references remain present, unavoidable, but no longer dictate the ultimate meaning of the work.”
Undeniable violence and destruction are happening in Cruz’s oeuvre. Any artist in the postcolonial context is faced with a similar question: how should one go about creating art when art itself is held to a colonial standard? Cruz throws his own lot in the ring: he refuses to conform to it, yet he does not ignore its historical implications. True creation does not exist in a vacuum; it builds not on a void. It builds upon ruins, the destruction of old values, which Cruz still leaves visible on the canvas, not as an actor but as a specter, a ghost, that must constantly be conjured for art to move forward. (Hannah Andrea Valiente)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"","alias":"","hp":3800000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":3800000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":25447,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":4566080,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":68647,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/125.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"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":124,"next":126,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}