JIGGER CRUZ (Filipino, B. 1984)

Filipino painter Jigger Cruz’s iconic style denies all categorisation. By directly juxtaposing the binaries of classical technique and abstract expressionism, the artist forces the viewer to directly confront two visual fields from very different time periods in art history in his pieces.
In the present lot, most of the image is painted over with both spray paint and thick layers of colourful paint laid down in heavy impasto, leaving only a horse’s eye and a maid servant’s face in the background recognisable. By doing so, Jigger Cruz allows us to encounter the classical briefly, while forcibly inserting his inner subjectivity onto the painting and its frame, both literally and metaphorically.