To experience Jinggoy Buensuceso’s Distortions of Reality is to immerse oneself in the fathomless ebb and flow of a manifold universe. The artist has fashioned himself a metal crown from the ruins of the ancien régime, and from the detritus of space, a new universe is reborn.

Buensuceso’s body of work is connected by an invisible cosmic thread weaving its way into the viewers’ unconscious mind. Each piece quietly infiltrates the personal microcosms within us, until we are forced to confront the true, unrelenting nature of time and existence.

In this nocturnal mindscape, the artist is represented in multiple forms, each one an intimate visual expression of the pangs of creative birth. He gives the viewers time to mourn, in collective grief, the inevitably of an all too brief life. It is a cri de coeur for humanity to rebel against the cognitive distortions that discolour our perceptions of ourselves, and to find redemption in the small moments that bind us.

Buenscuceso’s visual language oscillates between clarity and chaos; between the battlefields of exploding metals and papery exegesis; and in the final battle cry between the spirits within and the many faceless gods of Death’s constructions.

Silent Lucidity and Chaotic Dissonance

In the aftermath of the rondo called war, fragments of robots and battleships float in the complete silence of deep space. Suddenly - the cosmos awakens and unleashes infinite lines of hair from its darkness, encasing the fragments until they sink into its dreams of watery oblivion. Beneath what remains of old lives that have been destroyed, the foundations of new worlds can be rebuilt. Buensuceso’s hair is a symbol of his own personal power, of the artist’s quest for immortality and desire for his DNA to live on through his work, uncorrupted by time and space.

This Is Where the Machine Stops and Simphony in Plasticity

Amidst a backdrop of snowy canvases, Buensuceso tears asunder his son’s beloved toys and scatters them into a haphazard kaleidoscope of rainbow-hued plastic and multiple strands of his own hair, representing the inorganic and organic binaries that make up his own version of the universe. We are the universe, and the universe is a part of us. The memories of the universe are ours, and we are its memories.

Ancient Cities of Children

Quietly, and in the night, small hands build upon the faces of carbon giants. These giants were once trees, but fire turned them into fossils of a distant past. Their petrified bodies lay untouched for a hundred years, until the children of nearby forests reclaimed them and built their cities of black gold and shimmering sands.

Our Time Folds, Unfolds and Accelerates

Buensuceso’s most brutally-charged interpretation of his Origami series is a meditation on life and time’s fleeting nature, in bleak contrast to the vastness of universal existence. As if taken by the hand of a capricious God, the universe becomes a plaything to be bent and folded by divine will. The results are furious, hyper-fast landscapes of galaxies and nebulae manipulated by a God whose hands are stained with the insanity of destruction. This cosmic narrative is divided into three parts: retribution, redemption, and resolution.

Requiem For a Faraway Star

In molten space, a star looms crimson in its crumbling galaxy, waiting for Death. The red behemoth exhales and collapses in a rhapsody of fire and heat. To the rest of the universe, this death is but a small part of existence and goes unnoticed. But the universe knows, and will not tolerate the void. Hence, the dead star is reborn as a black portal where time stands as still as a black and white photograph, where multiple lives can be relived and lost loves rediscovered, all at the same time, through a lens darkly.

The Worlds Between Us

Imagine yourself lying on the ground and looking up at the clouds, and beyond these clouds, are worlds we do not know. Each cloud represents a life and a life’s journey. This life must travel in one direction down a very long road, until it reaches the end. This begs the question: is there more after this life? Or, do we just enjoy the modest pleasures that existence brings, however brief? Another interpretation is to see the clouds as resembling cells in the microcosm of our bodies, and every cell evolves and renews in perfect symbiosis of the flesh. At the very heart of our biology, human beings are drawn to each other. This sublime connection is what defines our humanity, in a world that is often disconnected, indifferent, and unhinged.

The Sea of Divine Madness

Our divine planet plays host to primordial seas teeming with ancient beings and godlike beasts. All life has its origins in the shadowlands of the deep. Our forefathers, born in the water, walked onto land in an evolutionary baptism. As we inhaled the petrichor of our newfound home, little did we know that we would one day return to be a part of the soil. And as the continents shift violently to form new lands, so too do we experience the full vehement upheaval of life when we die, so that new lives may be born.

Dystopian Future Overture

The omnipresent lines of Buensuceso’s signature Topography series lead us to a place of constant motion and entropy. The mountains of memories rise and fall in time with the civilisations of man. Great cities erode into deserts of dust. Only these living landscapes remain as testaments to mankind’s diseased world as he vaults mindlessly into the valley of his own destruction, forsaken by his own eternal evolution.

The Wound That Never Heals, the God That Never Dies

In Buensuceso’s central and most symbolic work, the artist identifies himself as a Christlike figure; not a figure of worship, but one that lies supine on an altar of personal suffering. By offering himself to the divine soil that birthed and nurtured him, he is humbling himself to the powers of the universe. The metal Christ’s fluids rain down on formations of centuries-old charcoal, which receive their blessings in silence. Over time, the giving of lifeblood will carve new lines into these old forms. The artist experiences his ultimate catharsis by infiltrating his own mind, destroying his body, and rebuilding his existence in a cosmos that belongs only to him. •