Sensations and Reflections: Articulating Accommodation
by Jose Tence Ruiz , Quezon City 2004
In proposing the tabula rasa as a project, Ruel Caasi reprises his investigation in a trajectory that brings him away from the didactic into the compositionally problematic. His works from the last decade responded to events overtly linked to the social, but he sought formal respite, a clearing, as it were to explore inner cravings sans communal agenda. Thus, tabula rasa here does not hark as much to post-natal void as to a longing for erasure and re-invention in midstream.
Interestingly, almost contradictorily, the reinvention carries a marked continuity. If the social were constituted along lines of hierarchy and equilibrium, Caasi’s new reflections are cast, accidental as they may appear, along as grip. It is the grid that underlies his execution; it is the grid, in its working asymmetry that reigns in the wayward drip or the unaccounted scrape; it is the grid that both anchors and defines this urge to accommodate. The accommodation reminds us of the utopian suggestions of Dutchman Mondrian, the autocratic reduction of the Russian Malevich, even the idyllic Brit classicism of Ben Nicholson.
Thus Caasi has, in search of his breathing space, opened up a vista within a vista. While the formal has moved to his immediate foreground, the underpinnings of this efforts, and we must reiterate the word effort, as a grid cannot but be premeditated, are still enmeshed in a struggle to organized. Yes there is the spontaneity occasioned by Caasi’s own deep attachment to organic phenomena such as the aqueous nature of suspended pigment, the drip brought on by rust and mildew meandering across urban walls, the uneven patina of moisture and drought. But all these are reigned into the architectonic and therein lies the tension of Caasi’s efforts - to articulate an accommodation of chance, discovery and process within a haven of alignment and equilibrium.
