1986 / Oil on canvas / 79 x 112 cm / Artist: Cesar Legaspi / Artist’s collection

In 1988, National Artist Legaspi held a major three-part exhibit, a combination of retrospective and new works. His Jeepney series, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum as one part of the show, was a brilliant culmination of the Neo-Realist style of early Philippine modernism applied to a folk subject.

Here the underlying cubist/geometric principle is brought to full advantage as it makes possible a dense and multilayered imagery rich in semiotic elements. In the highly compressed pictorial space, there are street graffiti and random texts, one of which is the word “Peace”; jeepney ornaments, including the aluminum charging steeds on the hood as a magnified motif; and a number of human figures, like driver and passengers—all part of the jeepney culture.

The geometrizing tendency is derived from cubism, but the style is enriched by overlapping transparencies of form that suggest spatial layers and densities. The strong, driving lines and bladelike shapes that radiate or suggest centrifugal/centripetal movements revive from exploding energies of futurism. The concatenation of figures, suggesting crowds, speed, sound, and light, captures the multisensory urban experience. The powerful dynamism of the work brings together the spatial and temporal dimensions, dream and reality, the past and the present.