MANILA, Philippines - Lovers of Fil Delacruz, rejoice! There?s a new celebratory air to the more recent oil and acrylic works of Fil Delacruz.

While the trademark gold remains here and there, the dominant colors are not so much brilliant or penetrating or foreboding, but festive and pulsating, even sunny and perhaps saccharine.

Overall the works take the viewer?s breath away and make them fall in love.

It would be easy to charge it all to Valentine?s, that season of swooning feeling. In fact, Delacruz has entitled his latest show ?Suyo,? perhaps in mock-romantic reference to the whys and wherefores of love and romance.

But perhaps the key words here are ceremony and ritual. The celebratory air owes to Delacruz?s ceremony of the innocent?of a neophyte?s rite of passage into the mysteries of the heart.

Romantic, naturalist

Romance fits into the artist?s oeuvre because the Delacruz iconography is basically romantic. Strictly speaking, his works continue to be naturalist in spirit, reflecting both his Bulakeño roots and his long stint in Mindanao, living with the Manobos, in the 1980s. Through all of this, he has evolved a syncretic aesthetic that is part pantheistic, part humanist.

In a way, the only way to tackle romance is through romanticism. By a return to nature, one discovers the roots of desire. One discovers that love is not flight of fancy, but a mooring on the earth.

Love?s moorings are evident in Delacruz?s works. The familiar female form seems to emanate from flora, looking like a flower jutting out of the woodwork.

The surreal quality of the works is very evident in the swirling lines that converge on the figure. The lines are really El Greco emanations: the long hair of the female figure seems an aural radar that?s in touch with the spirit of nature. Moreover, the lines seem like the ripples that define a tree?s age. All of these evocations of desire and romance are inevitably bound up with nature.

But the pantheism is not absolute. Delacruz?s is by no means an uncritical embrace of nature. As always, dark discharges seem to hover around the figure, in some instances, dangerously cavorting with the figure. The depictions are as much intimacies of the heart as well as intimations of portent.

Once more, Delacruz hammers the dualism of things, the deception behind the veneer of love and its effusions. Here are the wages of love, in bold, striking colors, in powerful, trenchant lines. Fil Delacruz?s romantic art is not for the weak of heart.

Fil Delacruz?s ?Suyo: Recent Works,? will open Feb. 12, 6:30 p.m., at ArtistSpace of Ayala Museum. Guests of honor are Nina Aguas and Francis Ed. Lim, president and CEO of the Philippine Stock Exchange. Call 7577117-21 or e-mail bahaysining@yahoo.com.