THE “Felix” in this painting’s title, Felix’s Leap into That Grumbacher and Lefranc & Bourgeois Ultramarine-Blue Acrylic Void, refers to Felix Baumgartner, who in 2012 did an actual leap and sky-dive from a helium balloon at an estimated distance of 39 kilometers above the Earth’s ground.

    Baumgartner’s dive reached an estimated top speed of 1,300+ km/h, which made him the first person to break the sound barrier without a vehicle, and that leap, sponsored by Red Bull for the Red Bull Stratos project, was ostensibly also aiming to help NASA come up with a design wherein astronauts could eject from space vehicles in jeopardy at a certain height of ascent and survive.

    But while de Veyra was here paying tribute to Baumgartner and his dive, the other facet of the painting actually almost parodies, or puts into question, something or someone else.

    That other facet is in its being a take on Yves Klein, which somewhat gives Klein the finger. It references the French painter’s blue paintings as well as his The Leap into the Void photomontage. More particularly, it treats of Klein’s supposedly spiritual explorations using the ultramarine-blue pigment’s emotional impact, personally to Klein the color nearest to the beyond, sort of like Giotto’s relationship with the lapis lazuli blue of his time. But in his own time, Klein was not satisfied with the ultramarine of his period and asked a paint supplier to look for a mix that would be more to his liking. Thus would be born shortly what would later be known as International Klein Blue, which was still based on the ultramarine. Klein registered IKB as an invention, but never got around to applying for a patent for it.

    In Klein, de Veyra was interested in the interplay between spirituality and commercial requirements or intellectual property requirements. Here he is not really parodying that duality in Klein, knowing that even Jesus had to employ the richest fisherman in his region along with a tax collector, but he was amused by the very necessity of that duality. While aware of how spirituality needed commerciality and a businessman behind any entire art product, it was interesting to him from a materialist or post-Marxist socio-political perspective, as well as from a perspective cynical towards supposedly purely religious or spiritual positions, to see this continuing quasi-dishonesty. He was also trying to be an Andy Warhol of sorts, happy with simply being ironic.

    In fact one can also see this same duality in the amazing, heroic feat de Veyra is endorsing in his composition, that feat by Felix Baumgartner speeding down to earth like Iron Man or Superman. For even though the feat itself had us focused on Baumgartner and his leap, we can still intermittently notice Red Bull’s logo on the skydiver’s leg.

    De Veyra was always inclined to believe in the primacy of spirituality behind actions and urges over and above spirituality that are merely claimed without any seen action, thus the artist’s partiality towards the inherent or subconscious spirituality in both scientists and extreme athletes, especially during those moments when they are awed by stimuli from life. This included Felix Baumgartner’s recurring urge to touch the edges of life and living.

    To de Veyra, Felix’s leap, the motivations behind that as re-dramatized in his painting, makes the piece directly allude to Klein in a critical way. Klein and his photomontage in Dimanche, which Klein titled Le Saut dans le vide (The Leap Into the Void), had Klein leaping into his void, but with some of his friends catching him. In short, the latter leap was a performance act, while Baumgartner’s may be said to be incomparably the real one. According to de Veyra, however, there is actually a similarity between Klein’s leap and Felix’s jump. Both did their jumps in the presence of technology, in Klein’s case the technology of the double exposure or photomontage, while in Baumgartner’s case the technologies involved in his skydiving feats.

    So, was de Veyra mocking Klein’s leap by mentally juxtaposing it with Baumgartner’s more epic one? Not really. For de Veyra is here merely juxtaposing Klein’s obsession with the beyond, with death, which is somewhat like Anish Kapoor’s obsession, with Baumgartner’s attraction to the act of surviving death at the edges of life. De Veyra thought that Klein’s obsession, if real, would be more a product of a curiosity towards the beyond and dissatisfaction with life, while Baumgartner’s was more akin to Janis Joplin’s near-overdose explorations on the edges of life accompanied by utter confidence in technologies’ safety measures. Furthermore, while the former is motivated by conjecture, the latter is coming from an urge to triumph.

​    Of course, others would insist that this piece is a satire, de Veyra’s satiric comment towards paintings that, instead of clearly referencing a certain spirituality in the world, claim, via their color fields or their materiality, to be spiritual themselves. If so, then one could say that this is perhaps de Veyra’s tongue-in-cheek take on certain Minimalism’s motives with their maximally minimized imageries.