SEVERAL days ago, ABS-CBN ran a segment about a young germaphobe who locked himself in his family?s bathroom for months, spending his days shouting chess moves at his father through the wall, and subsisting on flat food?the only kind his mother could get under the door.

Tragic, yes, but anyone who has ever met with a virgin sheet of bubble wrap or a sublimely pickable scab knows OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) can rock.

Nervous habits endear us to our friends, celebrities to their fans (e.g. Billy Bob Thornton?s orange-food obsession), and fictional characters to their audiences (think Jack Nicholson as Melvin Udall in ?As Good as it Gets,? or Tony Shalhoub as the obsessive hand-washing detective on the tube series ?Monk?).

For some, however, OCD behavior is neither disease nor pastime, but muse.

Art star in excess

Take Manuel Cruz-Sollod. The 28-year-old Ilocos-based artist is notorious for sorting thousands of candies by color, then using them as pixels to reconstruct iconic photographs.

Eccentric as his process sounds, Cruz-Sollod is one of the countless artists who have exhibited obsessive behavior in their themes and process. Post-impressionist Edward Degas spent much of his career painting nothing but ballet dancers. Local artist Roberto Murierto obsessively collected his own bodily fluids, hair and nails.

An eccentric tic in the ordinary person, an unhealthy ritualistic compulsion, may often enhance one?s reputation in the art world.

But Cruz-Sollod?Noe to his friends?isn?t cultivating a myth of instability and weird behavior. His obsessions hit a little too close to home for that.

Candy dandy

Tedious as applying up to 10,500 candies to a single canvas must be, the group exhibition Cruz-Sollod organized last week called ?OCD? struck a democratic chord in viewers.

Perhaps because the compulsions on display?paper-cutting, bubble wrap-popping, to name but a few?are familiar to so many of us. Or perhaps it was the timeliness of the work. Cruz-Sollod thinks the global financial anxiety may have fueled at least some of the interest in the show.

?The art we?re seeing reflects how we respond to imminent financial threats we can?t do anything about,? says Cruz-Sollod, who went to the UP College of Fine Arts. ?For someone to pay attention to one thing is threatening to society, because it?s saying, ?Wala akong pakialam kung anong nangyari sa The Buzz kagabi.? People see a person locking themselves in their own world and excluding them.?

Cruz-Sollod?s candies are glued as obsessively to the canvas as our eyes are to the television. When we watch the stocks vaporize over and over, aren?t we experiencing a mass-cultural form of OCD?

Sweet beginnings

He says his own artistic obsessions were born long before this crisis, however. The former graphic designer and printmaker fantasized obsessively while growing up, trying to make sense of a bewildering 1980s pop culture.

His earliest art was an attempt to make sense of what he saw on TV and heard on the radio. ?I spent 12 to 13 hours a day at home alone in the summer. I?d take cardboard and make the Ghostbusters? firehouse,? he says.

He thinks his first identifiable obsession, comic books, was the product of his rural isolation as a child.

?I used to get so excited when the mail came. To this day I freak out if it hasn?t come by 11 o?clock. It?s just left over from being 10 years old and wanting contact.?

Reluctant to be pigeonholed, Cruz-Sollod resists being identified as OC in the clinical sense (although a doctor who viewed the ?OCD? exhibit suggested he might be). He points out that what is called OCD behavior in the colloquial sense might be regarded as less remarkable in a calmer, saner world.

?In our ADHD society, is just spending five minutes paying attention to something OCD?? he asks.

In any case, isn?t there a little OCD in us all? Who doesn?t find themselves jiggling their feet, doodling on scratch paper, re-ordering the stuff on their desks? Cruz-Sollod says the desire for creating order out of disorder has a way of infecting even the most ?normal? viewer.

?It turned out it wasn?t enough to just use the M&Ms to make the image,? he chuckles. ?People wanted them all to be face up, going the right direction. With this kind of art, you?re inviting people to call you on your flaws.?

Crazy/Genius

One flaw, for some viewers at least, may be the work?s obsession with repetition over formal originality. Using compulsivity as a metaphor for financial paranoia, Cruz-Sollod?s works relieve one anxiety while creating another: Is it enough that art be about careful, hard work?

What do we make, for instance, of Adolf Wolfi, the 19th-century German who wrote a 25,000-page illustrated autobiography while institutionalized, or On Kawara?s ?Date Paintings,? monochromatic canvases inscribed with the date that the artist has produced daily since the 1960s?

Cruz-Sollod?s work doesn?t answer these questions. Its agenda, in fact, is to provoke them. Rather than encountering a mystification of the artist as a crazy genius, as biopics such as ?Pollock? or ?Sylvia? or ?Frida? tend to do, his work reveals the artist?s mania to be the viewer?s.

Our age has made nail-biters and hair-pullers of us all. Over a few weeks after the global financial crisis first made headlines, Cruz-Sollod?s work seems to pose the same dreadful question Nicholson, in the role of Melvin Udall, asks a room of his fellow psychotics: ?What if this is as good as it gets??