Immersion in the work of W.R. Cuevas is an immersion in the idiom of displacement. Which is as good as saying, one can never be immersed in the paintings of W.R. Cuevas. For one thing, one hardly knows who he is or what his ouevre is constituted of in the first place. As the artist's name suggests, his identity and work are in the caves (“cuevas”) of canonical omission—and his paintings are allegorical to this circumstance.

Colours emerge frenetically amid varying thicknesses of black, like his name emerging from Cebu into the darkening conscious of the largely ignorant Manila-based art scene. To stretch analogical possibilities, even like the shadowy intimations of shape sculpted by fire in “The Allegory of the Cave,” where Plato speaks about the nature of ignorance. The quantity of his works alone is sufficient to reveal both how long he has been painting and how long he has been ignored by critics and collectors: a sad turning-away that speaks more about this country's cliquish art crowds than about the quality of his abstractions.

Considering that Plato's metaphor for ignorance was the cave and Cuevas' works are allusions to this tale (albeit unintentional), won't it be fitting to consider each of his paintings an allegory to an allegory—or better yet, a meta-allegory?  Continued...