Detail of work by Bembol dela Cruz in his solo exhibition 'Accidental Abstraction' curated by Roberto Chabet at Magnet Gallery, Paseo Center from 24 April to 12 May 2007.

Excerpt from the press release:
'Following through from a series of paintings that delineate actual destruction of structures by political means in big cities around the world, Bembol dela Cruz in his latest exhibit entitled Accidental Abstraction rather skims through the petty, peripheral, everyday occurrences of near mishaps caused by collisions between automobiles and various street furniture such as walls, barricades, gutters, pipes, etc, coming up with uncannily Abstract-expressionist paintings that faintly approximate those of Gerard Richter's. However the similarities may just rest on surface treatment whence dela Cruz have always been impeccably skilled in the trompe l'oleil rendering of objects (as seen in his show The History of Things) and sites of violent upheavals (as seen in a recent show entitled Measures), clinical in their depiction of the seeming malignant nature of such. For this particular exhibit, it seems that dela Cruz has upped trompe l'oleil into a form of free design enacted by paint itself – one that is taken from the dents and scratches incurred from the actual collisions and near-crashes, and from approximating the resulting smears, embodying it even in the materiality of paint itself as thick and as raw it can be, but not quite so.

Abstract-expressionism for all its worth wrests from much random accidental effects. The spillage, the raking of brush against canvas, loaded palette knives slicing through caking layers of paint – all manifest a sudden outburst of rage, passion, or from whatever creative impulse these sort of strokes would have sprung forth, a force that's primeval and relentless but bound by the physical limitation of measure and material. Yet it remains as a spectacular site of the pathos of a lone brutalizer of plastic surface swaggering through several uncertain means to an end. The driver of a speeding automobile embodies the same rapturous rush, instantly gratified by the intermingling sensation of fear, panic and quick thinking, but uncertain of the impact of two heavy bodies colliding, of metal impacting on concrete, an enclosure against another enclosure. Being in a built environment that continually puts up boundaries and meticulously lays out the movement of its denizens propels even more this impetus to crash through them or even scratch though them by nail and tooth and limb as in the undying juvenile stigma attached to skating and tagging/ graffiti. But these are deliberate undertakings, accidents are rather deliberated by gravity and physics alone, and of course by human error.

Dela Cruz, in painting these collision marks – photographically-based, by grid, deliberate, however they’re laid on thickly - plays more like a forensics detective in revealing the colors and patterns in each layer, as though believing that painting is never really just the result of many 'happy accidents', that 'if there's been a way to build it, there'll be a way to destroy it, things are not all that out of control' (Crest, by Stereolab).'