Lights Guessing

McCoy Lazaruz

There is something dynamic about how the subtlest shifts in light and shadow reveal the different facets of the human face, form, and a momentous glimpse of what’s underneath. In Lights Guessing, McCoy Lazaruz invokes the delicate dance between seeing and painting, particularly in its necessity and nuances in creating portraits. In the act of identifying shapes, angles, and shadow tones of his chosen subjects—himself included —he believes he becomes better at mapping out features, such as of his own reflection whenever he makes self-portraits. Most comfortable in a live setting, Lazaruz believes that the changes in lights, shadow tones, and their interplay with the other internal and external variables of his subject—a tremble, a muffled grin, a power outage, eclipse, or rapture—adds more details to his works with each shift and shuffle.  In a way, he feels he is “like lights guessing, I guess,” Lazaruz says.

A graduate of Bulacan State University’s Fine Arts program with a major in Visual Communication and a 2019 Tuklas mentee at Eskinita Art Gallery, Lazaruz’s early foray into painting was primarily inspired by Filipino artists Jojo Legaspi and Andres Barrioquinto. While expressing a preference for using real references for portraits, he also summons purely imagined images when he wants to experiment. In “Flesh Vendor”, for example, he experimented with a mix of oil paints and graphite powder diluted with spirits. He then waits and lets the images appear from the stains, helping tell their own story while his mind completes the rest. Each portrait takes the viewer through the probable spectrum of stillness, stifled madness, and awareness of any changes in inflection that quietly occurs during the painting process, frozen in final form or halfway through.

In the absence of light, do things behave as they’re expected? In both its absence and its arrival, we can only be kept guessing.

-Nikki Ignacio