The highly controversial art of Jose Legaspi has been branded everything from blasphemous to evil to downright satanic—labels he happily laps up but hardly accepts. His one rare and true virtue though is the one that’s almost never remarked upon: his honesty. For a special feature of his work in Rogue, Erwin Romulo ventures into the mind of one of the few truly shocking and original artists living today.

“By now you have decided I am mad, and that this book cannot have been to anyone else what it has been to me; so let me close by describing the cover of the used copy I got. You have seen a thousand in which a hero with a broadsword battles some monster. This shows a youngish man, not quite muscular enough to be that sort of hero, but decent-looking and intelligent. Behind him stands an ogre, dark and bullet-headed, with glowing eyes-the brute refuse of nightmare. One of its hands is upon the man’s shoulder, in the most friendly, comradely way. The artist is Douglas Rosa; I know nothing about him except that he painted this picture.”
-Concluding paragraph of Gene Wolfe’s essay about H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (from the book Horror: 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones & Kim Newman).

“Man’s mind is not his own. It’s completely dominated by complexes, anxieties, fear and prejudices of countless sick generations before him.”
-Quoted from the 1959 film, Terror is a Man (dir. Gerardo de Leon)

The Painting: In it is nothing but a man and his animal. Under a gray light, they are ashen figures in this setting bare but for concrete—an illicit coupling caught in the glare with everything except their pants down. The man’s penis is hanging out—an ugly motherfucker ( . . . the brute refuse of nightmare). His face is equally grotesque—a death’s head wearing a stuffed flesh-mask, its dermis the hue of boiled meat. Even with a face, the eyes are inhuman. His grip on the animal’s leash seems slack, but the creature is so emaciated that it doesn’t run away. It just stands there beside him, pathetic and carrying the burden of a woman’s head. Not so much dead as damned, they stand here without time but within walls.

The Title: “Portrait of my Parents”
I encountered this piece in 1998. The artist was Jose Legaspi. I knew nothing about him except that he painted this picture.

The apocrypha surrounding Jose Legaspi is myriad, strange, and probably true. That his childhood was particularly troubled, that his homosexuality vexed his relationship with his parents, and that it’s been one atrocity exhibition after the next ever since. For an exhibit entitled Knives which featured an effigy of his mother stabbed by 13 daggers—one story goes—he dressed her in her wedding dress. Another story had him pursuing ill-advised love affairs, investing fully in them despite knowing that they would end badly—all in preparation to start work on an upcoming show. Usually reluctant to be interviewed, he hasn’t dispelled the image of being a nasty piece of work.

For the most part, he hasn’t needed to say much to convey his work’s meanings. “It’s not snob art,” he has said in interviews before, “The meaning is very clear.” Indeed, there was no doubt why there were protests against the showing of his sculpture depicting the Virgin Mary vomiting on the Holy Infant during an exhibition in 1995. Another work like “Pious”—as described by Asiaweek—portrays “a man in a bikini, praying with a rosary in a rather untraditional fashion.“ In 2004, two visitors expressed “shock and disgust” at an art exhibition aptly titled Rude Shock at the Lewers Gallery in Penrith. The group exhibition consisted of works the featured artists produced while in residence at the gallery. Local artists castigated the organizers for showcasing work they could not describe as “any form of art whatsoever” and “throwing [it] in the face of families.” To quote the article (Tegan Slugget, “Artwork a ‘Rude Shock’” in Blue Mountain News, October 29, 2004):

“The artwork Ms. Lester and Ms. Graham found most offensive was a charcoal drawing by Jose Legaspi of the crucifix inserted between a person’s buttocks in Legaspi’s collection `Phlegm.‘“

“Growing up with those symbols—the crucifix, the halo, all of them very important,” he’s quoted as saying (almost like setting up the inevitable punch-line), “You wonder—what would happen if I spat on them?” Legaspi wasn’t kidding. His frequent inclusion of Catholic iconography and deliberate perversion of Biblical accounts of sacrifice and suffering in his work is always guaranteed to court opprobrium in a predominantly Christian culture and society. Yet despite the blasphemy, there’s no doubting the almost-biblical agony that informs them, the leukemia of emotion that has withered the garden and left only this dank place. It reeks of memory.

In between preparation for two shows—one in Japan and another in the Drawing Room Gallery in Makati—Legaspi gave an exclusive interview to Rogue. “My previous works were all done while experiencing the images I was doing,” he says. “My recent ones are memories.” For the past several years, the internationally acclaimed artist has been “temporarily” living in Daet, and—although things haven’t been as uneventful as expected (i.e. he’s been a victim of a number of break-ins)—it certainly has provided distance.

Ironically, this seems to have put his work into sharper focus. Looking at some of his earliest works—which he is unsatisfied with and did not allow us to print—they appear to be raw and impressions in broad strokes. It’s as if he’s trying hard to record events as they unfold. The details are slurred, like a camera trying to capture a moving subject without using a flash. But—like a photojournalist in a crime scene—the effect isn’t as much to command attention as to grab the jugular. His newest work is now refined and carefully executed, each painting taking a month on the average to finish. The pictures are just as shocking; but age and experience seems to have granted him repose—the stability of a tripod translating the clearer image.

Legaspi himself offers to explain. “In comparison to my earlier works, I am now more inclined in making my works ‘simpler,’ which means I am now concentrating on pastel works,” he says. “Having tried out different art forms . . . sculpture, oil on canvas, and even performance—which I now find ridiculous and wish I had not even gone into it—I am now going back to a medium I am most comfortable with, which is drawing with pastel.” He says that it makes the work “truer.”

Tellingly, he explains: “[It’s] the medium I used during my childhood years.” With its constant usage of personages, themes, and color palette, his paintings—and the act of executing them—are the ritual exorcisms of long-held anguish from that period. The repeated depiction of a paternal ogre in particular suggest that the artist’s demons marked him early on; and that it wore a face he knew too well to ever forget.

But Legaspi isn’t soliciting any pity from his audience. In fact, on most days, he hardly seems to give a shit.

“Legaspi is making noise; but as his paintings shock and disturb, I don’t see him becoming very popular for our local market.”
-Malang in an interview for The Philippine Star (2002)

His attitude is nonchalant about accusations that he goes too far. “In my opinion, one does not have to go far if honesty is involved,” he explains. “Liars tend to cloak themselves with a myriad of explanations and theories. They are like church people, with all the trimmings and statues and rituals, to portray something non-existent.”
Asked if he feels he’s outgrown his subject-matter—particularly religion, he is curt in his reply.

“I do not think there are time-frames regarding these matters,” he says. “In fact, we can now see how far religious fervor has gone [to terrorism] and the never ending war in the Middle East all because of ‘god.‘“

No wonder those god-fearing artists in Australia thought they were looking at something that writer Will Self calls “panapathonogenic,” meaning something “inherently evil or nasty.”
“At the Vargas Museum, some sects started chanting prayers to exorcise my works,” he says. “It is so funny. Man is really the only creature on this planet who can fool himself.”
But as he himself says: “Tragedy and comedy are inseparable.”

If there’s a deity that Legaspi’s work respects, it’s ugliness.

Asked if he feels he’s outgrown his subject-matter—particularly religion, he is curt in his reply. “I do not think there are time-frames regarding these matters,” he says. “In fact, we can now see how far religious fervor has gone [to terrorism] and the never ending war in the Middle East all because of ‘god.‘“

“I only draw what I see,” he says. “Besides, is anything more ugly or shocking than what we see in real life? Animal cruelty, greed and power, false self-esteem, the list goes on . . . At least mine are just drawings.”

Talking about his drawings, he says that his frequent inclusion of feral-looking beasts in his work—particularly disturbing as biomorphic chimeras of dog and man (family member?)—represents the rabid, primal nature of man. “We’re ultimately all animals,” he has often said in interviews before. It’s repression that Legaspi points to as the cause of “social norms becoming abnormal.”

Curiously, Legaspi took up Biological Science and Zoology at the University of Santo Tomas. “It’s the best pre-med course, and I planned to take up a career—but my father was a gambler and didn’t care about my studies,” he says. “Also, I graduated with a 1.25 average. Not as stupid as my father after all . . .”

Does he feel he would’ve been like Dr. Moreau—the titular character in the H.G. Wells’s novel described by its own author as a “youthful piece of blasphemy”— vivisecting man and beast and acting as the “anti-god” in his perverted Eden of an island instead?

Press the coincidences even further, Legaspi was born in 1959—the same year National Artist for Film Eddie Romero produced Terror is a Man, the first installment of Quentin Tarantino’s fave grindhouse series collectively known as the “Blood Island” movies. Directed by another National Artist Gerry de Leon, it was essentially a rip-off of The Island of Dr. Moreau to be promoted abroad to the growing drive-in market.

Pondering for a bit, he says instead, “Dr. Frankenstein.”

* * *

This is sick.
A girl and her horse.
Nope, it’s not what you think. Let’s clarify then. A young girl and her horse.
Worse?
Here’s the whole story. The girl was no more than 10-12 years old. She loved her horse. That was obvious enough before she mounted the animal for training. She wanted be an equestrienne—and she was studying under a renowned rider. Her mentor was a thin, petite mestiza—if she was smiling it would undoubtedly be lovely.
But then she wasn’t this afternoon.
The girl’s horse tripped on one of the beams they were vaulting over. Trotting a few paces, the horse comes to a halt. Both seem to be waiting for something. Via megaphone, she is told by her teacher to give the horse three whips.
The girl does not.
Louder, the command came: “A____! Whip her this instant!”
The sound of her heart breaking was more audible than the whip.
“WHIP HER!”
A___ whips her horse. This time the animal felt the sting.
“HARDER!”
Fighting back sobs, she whips her horse again.
“HARDER!
She cannot.
Her teacher lowers her voice but not the cut of her tongue. “I told you that if you make a mistake—it’s she that suffers. Now, whip her!”
A____ holds still—but only for a moment.
The horse is whipped three more times—quick, bolts of pain, like reports from a pistol, a banal sound.
The instructor’s fiancée struts into the ring, apparently an accomplished rider too.
They give each other a perfunctory kiss.
He says something and laughs. She smiles.
It is ugly.
The girl gets ready for another round.
- Excerpt from author’s journal, 2004

* * *

At the time of his exhibition Knives at the Hiraya Gallery, the gallery’s curator/owner Didi Dee commented that “at that time, no one appreciated the artist.” This was in 1998.
“Today, he is a most sought after visual artist, and even his charcoal drawings sell for dollars,” says Dee.

His cult-of-influence has continued to grow, his work appealing to a new generation of painters as well as visual artists in fields such as photography and film. Even musicians have cited him—especially Laguna-based electronica artist Moon Fear Moon who is at present doing an entire album based on Legaspi’s more recent portraits.

Having exhibited in Hong Kong, Europe, and the U.S.A. (as well as in the Philippines), his profile and work have been made the subjects of various scholars from the West doing studies on Southeast Asian Art.

Surely all this contributes to the refinement of his art?

Legaspi dismisses this. “I do not think my temporary stay in Daet or ‘acclaim’ has any profound effect on my current works,” he says. Pressed on the point, he accedes that—at least for the former—that he now thinks he is “able to draw the sea better.”

To the best of our knowledge and several others, Legaspi has never exhibited any paintings with the sea.

Known for his wicked humor in interviews, he told a foreign journalist once that he thinks his core audience is made up of “sadists.”

“Yes, and also some masochists I think,” he volunteers. “I must have missed them out during my early interviews.”