Jose V. Ayala wields the pen as skillfully as the brush. Someone who endows images with the resonance of poetry and his poems – the palpable impact of a painting. He views the world in a sort of holistic harmony, yet he is more than aware of the apparent randomness in many things. Even the innate contradictions seen in most things taken as reality. It is an awareness which makes up Ayala's painted world.

“Recently the topic of chance and randomness has become a new mathematical range of orderly analysis for chaos and disorder,” notes Ayala. “Now there is a method behind the seeming lack of direction to motion – like ocean waves breaking on rocks near shore. Close introspection of the many suborders of swirling, flowing vortices become so fine that they seem unguided or chancy.”

Jose V. Ayala, poet and painter, also appears like a child of chance, a confluence of contradictions. A man who looks like a cross between Gauguin and a sumo wrestler, he acts nonetheless, like a sage or guru from the Himalayas. He lives way out of the city, in a banana plantation in Davao – yet, his sensibility, his range of vision – is truly cosmopolitan.

The imagery, the visual range of his collages include ancient monks and glamorous stars; modern highrises of New York and parched, deserted lands; images so much of this world and images so abstract that their existence can only be in the mind. Collages made of things as timely newspaper cuttings yet endowed with the elusive reality of a dream.

Still, Ayala is also a man, at 58, who writes love poems with the intensity of a young man.

The visual meter which approximates his poetry is his collages. “In the creation of collages the absorption of thousands of pictures at random moving along thought patterns, matrices, synapses, and eventually congeal to become an infinite range of subtlety through randomness becoming a spectrum of order that enables an artist to conceive a whole new world of complexity and subtle order.”

Living in a plantation where the rhythm of nature is most deeply felt, Ayala opens himself to the world using as his window, all the images from the print media which now inundate modern man. These images free from time. Or national boundaries. Or conventional social distinctions. There images are now, for Ayala – simply a cascade of visual words – “the composite fractional dimensions of objects as Einstein found the simplicity about the universe functioning on laws of microcosmos.”

The confluence of disparate realities within Ayala's pictorial format achieves a surreal effect, a level of reality made familiar with such drama by Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali and on a more abstract level, in the works of Joan Miro. Who could forget the surreal antics of Dali, the artist with the well-waxed, pointed moustaches and piercing eyes who rode a bathtub through a glass plate into New York's ritzy Fifth Avenue? Or the searing imagery of love and pain embodied in the film Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñnel and Salvador Dali whose shooting script opens:

Once upon a time . . .

A balcony. Night. A man is sharpening a razor by the balcony. The man looks through a window at the sky and sees . . .

The light cloud passing across the face of the full moon.

The head of a young woman with wide open eyes.

The blade of a razor moves towards one of her eyes.

The light cloud now moves across the face of the moon.

The razor-blade slices the eye of the young woman, dividing it.

A truly absurd chain of images. Yet who can say to a lovelorn young woman that the clouds passing over the moon-glow of her love are not as painful as a razorblade cutting off her vision?

Ayala's surreal-touched images are more gentle and lyrical. But they are no less intense. Or any less passionate. Time can contract or expand into a primeval, immutable state – whirling in a kind of galactic motion – as in is Within Buddha's Time . Realistic images, both modern and ancient vintages, are melded with conceptual ideograms to attain a new reality. Perhaps a higher and in a sense, a more true reality.

Time even in such works as The Last Hours of Summer and Twilight is never a mechanical measure for Ayala, as in his Buddha's Time time is both a historical and geographic continuum. It is also – within the space of a single work – inclusive of both physical and intellectual dimensions. These are usually stated within definite zones.

Sometimes, historical dimensions are contracted but the spatial or geographic aspect is proportionately expanded. In La Marquesa in Solitarity the note of the present, of modernity, is strongly suggested. But even more so, is the idea of spatial expanse: from the sophisticated western Marquesa to her more earthy, bare breasted counterpart from some unknown continent to the more demure Pacific lass with a flower on her hair. And – beneath every reality – Hindu deities look on – from mirrors, boxes, etc. Each image – boxed in solitude, but also somehow linked to each other by undulating, organic forms.

There is order in Ayala's randomness.

Ayala's contraction and expansion of time and space certainly finds its parallel rational in Lao Tzu:

“In order to contract a thing, one should surely expand it first.

In order to weaken, one will surely strengthen first.

In order to take, one will surely give first.

This is called subtle wisdom.”

And Ayala's collages? Visual wisdom. Perhaps.

Ayala's mode of organizing images is also a process of contraction and expansion – a shifting interplay between conscious and unconscious process. As he so aptly put it: “ My dream collages are based on looking, scanning hundreds of pictures of old magazines, photos, etc. After a few days or weeks or months the pictures shifted my mind and sleep begins to gel through introspection, through just a few striking combinations and positioning or relationships. The creation of collages can be singular or various works simultaneously produced. It all depends on sensory stimulation, time, and the mechanical process of separating and combining can be an advantage or disadvantage based on intuition. Before doing creative work I normally clear myself of all distractions and gradually become totally immersed in the work at hand.”

Total immersion. Total openness. Is it surprising if Ayala exudes the aura of a guru?

Stillness and change. The interpretation of space and time. Of dream and reality.

Just as the universe is a dynamic unity – the cosmic Dancer Shiva. Or as the Buddha pointed out, a world of ceaseless change – samsara. Or as the physicists assert – sub-atomic particles in constant motion.

For Ayala, images in ever-changing contexts.