Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
BEMBOL DELA CRUZ
In Plain Sight
In his solo exhibition, In Plain Sight, Bembol Dela Cruz reconsiders camouflage beyond its militaristic roots, using it instead as a way to think about how individuals move within larger social and political environments. Here, camouflage is less about concealment in battle and more about the everyday act of blending in—of adjusting oneself in response to shifting contexts and expectations.
At the center of the exhibition is a self-portrait: the artist dressed entirely in camouflage, from hat to shirt to pants. The figure seems to recede into its surroundings, yet a pair of Sneakers interrupts this near-erasure. The choice feels deliberate. Even in the act of blending in, there remains a trace of individuality—something that resists full assimilation, something that insists on being noticed.
While the work may appear autobiographical, it resists a straightforward reading. The artist allows himself to be recognized, but not fully known. There is a measured withholding at play, as if to suggest that identity is never entirely given over to the viewer. Instead, it is carefully managed—revealed in parts, concealed in others. In this way, the work underscores a quiet assertion: that the artist retains control over how he is seen.
As the artist notes, individuals have the ability to navigate between presence and absence, to turn certain aspects of themselves on or off depending on the situation. At times, this negotiation may be a matter of survival. Yet within the neutral space of the canvas, camouflage does not disappear as intended. It becomes visible, even unavoidable, carrying with it echoes of its history—of conflict, of occupation, of systems that once relied on it for dominance.
Across the exhibition, Dela Cruz takes on the role of a camoufleur, responsive to his environment and attentive to what is revealed or withheld. The works resist a complete or fixed reading, suggesting instead that the self is always in flux—shifting, adjusting, and at times slipping from view. In In Plain Sight, visibility is never absolute, and identity asserts its presence precisely through its capacity to elude.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
AYO
Painting After Surfing
Surfing the home break waves in La Union is still the main inspiration for these
recent paintings and it became a program for my work, the art making process is just to flow in and out, or drive the intensity and complexity of something whatever the consequences. How do you represent something that has no consistent form? It’s like riding the swell with an 8’0 or a 9’0 log with a similar froth to paintbrush strokes.
The two diverse paths, Surf and Paint, Paint and Surf go hand in hand and you would only be able to elucidate their principles by doing it. Each WAVE is different and painting relates to it in a sense. The purpose, pattern, or structure, often occurring by coincidence. Yeah, it also refers to the size, position, shape, or arrangement within a space.
I can’t really explain the stoke here,
It’s just
PAINTING AFTER SURFING
is an experience.
On another level,
It is an access to a “spatial depth”.
-AYO
ANDRE BALDOVINO
Biomes
Biomes dissects the logic of Andre Baldovino’s artmaking process. He frames the exhibition as a manual for understanding his practice by rendering it legible in exercises in reconfigurations. Symbolically conceiving them as “biomes,” the present works are akin to worlds conjured from a machinery of objects, formal elements, and ideas—engineered according to principles that bisect art and biology, and ultimately demonstrating the significance of negotiations in his worldmaking.
Baldovino prefaces the exhibition with 36 glass containers occupying three shelving units. Fashioned after aquariums or terraria, they emerge as the primary illustrative device of his creative process; the works were assembled through a logic that mimics procedural generation in video game maps, where an algorithm is instructed to generate seemingly infinite content out of a finite inventory of assets and code. While this process may initially appear as exclusively mathematical or formulaic, spontaneity comes into play when the program randomizes the combinations and through the human player’s decisions made in-game. From these, two salient points may be observed: (1) the tendency to negotiate competing imperatives (e.g. infinite content generated from a finite inventory; computers cooperating with human users), and (2) negotiation as a strategy of progress and survival amid a volatile world.
To make each installation, Baldovino picked out objects then coded them into terraria drawing on his background in artistic composition. He designates this method as a substrate-subject-support system: materials such as soil, cement, and lava rocks form the ecosystem’s substrate or foundation which anchors the subject—plants, driftwood, pyramids, and other articles that serve as the focal point of the terrarium. Any visual imbalance in the arrangement of the two components is tempered by the support, including moss, wooden shapes, and bioballs. Although these objects are sourced, foraged, or purchased arbitrarily, their resultant presentation remains within the extent of the artist’s personal style of composition. Notice also that they are derived from both natural and manmade sources, but the line delineating their distinction is blurred during instances of artistic manipulations performed on organic subjects, as in the case of a twig coated in bright, crimson latex paint. Thus, by formulating this three-fold classification, the artist is essentially isolating the elements and dissecting their relations that often emerge as contradictory.
The same approach may be extended to decode the canvas works. As records of Baldovino’s evolving history of teetering between landscape and abstraction, the formal elements and techniques that comprise the paintings converge to betray visual tensions. Organic forms conceal architectural shapes, rigid contours puncture fluid surfaces, and representation collapses into abstract figures. In this collusion of contradictory tendencies, tension emerges between horizontal and vertical lines, alluding to his developing interest in the conceptual opposition between growth—figured through the horizontal—and progress, articulated through the vertical.
In sum, what the artist performs is a continuous recalibration of existing elements gathered from his surroundings and from his artistic repertoire. While video games rely on decisions performed by both computer and player, Baldovino generates his worlds—currently emerging in the form of terraria and paintings—through the calculations and spontaneous acts of his own creative negotiations. In both contexts, the objective is to survive: to strike an equilibrium of elements and to sustain life, whether in a game, in a physical aquarium, or on canvas. In this light, Biomes positions Baldovino’s practice as an open system—one that continually generates, negotiates, and reprograms from within its own evolving conditions.
-Chesca Santiago
PETE JIMENEZ
You are the Apple of my Eye
An installation of crushed stainless-steel water tanks shaped like bitten apples forms Pete Jimenez’ meditation on Biblical excerpts. He reframes the fall in the Garden of Eden through the looming threat of water scarcity in the Philippines. The thirty-one apples correspond to the days of a month, suggesting both cyclical time and a countdown, a finite measure of a resource we often presume to be inexhaustible.
Provocative yet darkly playful, the sculptures transform industrial debris into a moral allegory. Through the strenuous compression of discarded material, Jimenez stages an act of destruction that becomes creation. The tanks, once vessels storing vital sustenance, are rendered fragile and wounded. In their damaged forms, they evoke desire, consumption, and consequence.
In an archipelago surrounded by water yet threatened by its scarcity, the allegory sharpens. Poor water management, watershed degradation, pollution, rapid urban expansion, and climate volatility strain an already limited supply. Metro Manila, which relies heavily on insufficient reservoir systems, remains particularly exposed. Longer droughts, irregular rainfall, leaking infrastructure, and contaminated rivers intensify the crisis, with far-reaching implications for public health, food security, and economic stability, billions wasted annually.
Drawing from Deuteronomy 32:10: “He found him in a desert land, And in the howling waste of a wilderness, He encircled him, He cared for him, He guarded him as the apple (the pupil) of His eye,” Jimenez reclaims the apple as an emblem of divine care as much as human transgression. It is a rupture in our stewardship of the natural world. The fall from Eden becomes a contemporary parable: paradise forfeited, a modern day exile of our own making.
However, the work of Jimenez not only brings to light these issues but also encourages us to think about solutions. Experts have advised improving water conservation at both household and industrial levels, investing in alternative water sources such as rainwater harvesting, upgrading infrastructure to reduce leaks, and enforcement of pollution control laws to protect water safety. Despite the weightiness of both his materials and his themes, Jimenez injects artistic wit, creating fluid and recognizable shapes that hold their own form of beauty.
The objects, at once humorous and foreboding, carry unexpected elegance. Balancing irony with urgency, the work resists despair. Instead, it proposes empathy and responsibility: a recognition that what we regard as “the apple of our eye” must extend beyond symbolism to the very systems that sustain life. In merging religious allegory with urban social reality, Jimenez offers an exhibit that is both cautionary and hopeful. He calls for greater awareness of the fragile systems that sustain us.
By Stephanie Frondoso
EUGENE JARQUE
See the Sun
In his solo exhibition See the Sun, Eugene Jarque invites us to contemplate the subtle forces that set life into motion—those quiet signals that guide movement, growth, and flourishing. In these works, he considers how such imperceptible cues draw the tendrils of flora toward the sun, or urge roots downward into the earth’s depths. For Jarque, the world unfolds as a vast and ordered topography in which every element seeks its proper place, its fitting point of arrival.
He realizes this vision through a process of incision and reassembly: strips of canvas are cut and then painstakingly affixed onto wood. This act of dismantling and rebuilding releases the pictorial surface from the tyranny of flatness. What emerges instead is a field animated by repetition and multiplicity—configurations that suggest branching limbs, root systems spreading in silent labor, the latent geometries embedded within the natural world.
This method finds another articulation in “Interstice,” a work composed of six differently shaped panels that hover between fragmentation and unity. While each piece stands apart, the ensemble gestures toward a possible whole. As broken segments, they evoke terrains of troughs and peaks, landscapes assembled from rupture.
See the Sun ultimately offers a way of perceiving the world through Jarque’s accumulating lines. They remind us that every structure begins with the modest and the slight—that what we recognize as monumental may very well arise from the patient gathering of fragments.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
MAC VALDEZCO
Taga-silim
In her solo exhibition Taga-silim, Mac Valdezco considers a pair of forces that shape how we see the world: light and dark, luminosity and opacity. Rather than treating them as strict opposites, she approaches them as conditions that exist together, each defining and activating the other.
In works such as “Kariktan sa kasukalan,” “Sa ilalim ng araw,” and “Sa ilalim ng buwan,” darkness is not simply what remains when light recedes, nor is it confined to the role of negative space. It is treated as something with its own presence and character—an aspect of daily experience that quietly frames how we move through the world. In these canvases, dark passages appear to spread and gather across the surface, extending in branching lines and clustered forms that seem to grow across the pictorial field. What emerges is an acknowledgment, suggested by the title “Kariktan sa kasukalan,” that beauty can reside in density, in the layered and the tangled.
For the series “Taga-silim,” Valdezco brings this sensibility into three-dimensional form. Known for her work in soft sculpture, she creates amorphous structures from nylon cord to acrylic beads. The resulting forms resemble membranes or natural containers—hives, cocoons, and other structures that shelter and sustain life. Their surfaces accumulate loops, knots, and small clusters of beads, giving them the appearance of having formed gradually, as if through a process of quiet accretion.
Taga-silim reflects Valdezco’s sustained interest in the organic and the amorphous. Across both painting and sculpture, her works suggest forms that echo processes found in nature. In their elementary, hushed forms, they resemble sites of incubation—quiet thresholds where life gathers its force before emerging into visibility.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
GARRYLOID POMOY
For whatever purpose it may serve
In For whatever purpose it may serve, Garryloid Pomoy returns to the lexicon of tailoring and sewing, rendering its implements as still lifes stripped of sentimentality. The exhibition focuses its gaze on sewing kits—those intimate constellations of threads still lodged in needle eyes, tape measures slackened by use, wound laces, spare buttons, and waiting scissors. Typically housed in repurposed cookie tins, these tools are summoned for acts of repair: to close a tear, fasten what has come loose, restore what has frayed.
Pomoy paints them not as neutral objects but as indices of their owners, a form of objectified self-portraiture, made more intimate by the fact that these kits belong to those closest to him. A pin cushion punctured with real needles and threaded pins unsettles the boundary between representation and thing, collapsing the distance between subject and object, signifier and signified.
Much of Pomoy’s recent practice has drawn from the working tools of his mother—most notably her sewing machine—now transformed into motifs of recollection. Following her passing, what remains is an archive of objects and the memories they carry. These paintings function both as acts of mourning and gestures of keeping: reminders that the living are often recalled through what they leave behind, and that objects can ignite remembrance long after hands have abandoned them. Each brushstroke behaves like a stitch, binding fragments of memory to the surface of the canvas.
The exhibition’s title gestures toward the mutable lives of things and the roles they assume within ours. Whether objects serve to manage the everyday, to accrue beauty, or to hold meaning, they are never inert. For whatever purpose it may serve lingers in this space of use and after-use, inviting viewers to dwell in the quiet labor of meaning-making—where function gives way to memory, and the ordinary becomes a site of care, loss, and continuance.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
LES AMACIO
When Did You Arrive?
Arrival is never singular. It is layered, haunted by the steps that came before and the distances
that remain ahead. To arrive is to declare presence, yet it is also to carry the invisible weight of
displacement, of exile, of the long road that does not end at the door.
The question “When did you arrive?” appears simple, but it unsettles. It can be asked in curiosity, but also in suspicion. It marks the stranger, the migrant, the newcomer, the one who does not yet belong. It echoes in airports, in borders, in towns where accents betray origins, in rooms where histories are erased. To be asked when you arrived is also to be reminded that your presence is provisional, that recognition is conditional, that belonging is something you must prove again and again.
These works dwell in that fragile terrain. They speak of thresholds crossed and yet uncrossed, of homes left behind and homes not yet found. Textures emerge like scars of journey, colors fold into one another like overlapping geographies, and forms seem suspended between exile and return. Arrival here is not an endpoint but a restless negotiation with visibility and erasure.
And hope — what of hope ? Hope accompanies every departure, every crossing, every act of
return. Yet here it is interrogated. What kind of hope is it that fuels migration? The hope of better lives, of freedom, of futures still unwritten. But also the fragile hope of being welcomed, of being seen as equal, of being allowed to stay. Too often, hope is tested, bruised, deferred. Entire generations live in the waiting room of hope, suspended between what was left and what has not yet arrived.
Still, hope persists, though it is no longer innocent. It is carried like contraband in memory, like a hidden seed in the folds of clothing. It is fragile, but it survives in acts of making, in the courage to step again into spaces that once excluded, in the quiet refusal to vanish. These works bear witness to that survival—hope that is fractured yet luminous, a hope that knows the pain of disappointment yet continues to breathe.
“When Did You Arrive?” is also a question of intimacy. It asks when we entered each other’s lives, when we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, when we recognized ourselves in another’s story. Arrival is not only about geography—it is about the heart, about the thresholds of trust and tenderness.
This exhibition becomes a gathering of such thresholds. It refuses the idea of arrival as
completion and instead lingers in the fragile in-between: between exile and return, between
estrangement and belonging, between despair and hope. It asks viewers not only to witness
these arrivals but to reflect on their own. When did you arrive at who you are now? When did youlose hope, and when did it return? When will you arrive again?
-Les Amacio
DZEN SALINGA
"From Where I Stand"
Dzen Salinga’s Solo exhibit “From where I stand” is an exploration of perception,
malice, and understanding. In literal meaning the show title is humoring a thought of contradiction, opposing the very idea and purpose of the subject in the paintings, -Chairs.
Salinga used a variety of chair/couch cut-outs as unconventional viewfinder, encapsulating images that have the same properties, changing only its appearance to impersonate a new one. By doing so, she limits and controls the vision of the naked eye while on the other hand expanding its meaning, tickling the brain to transform simple objects into a paradox of things, opening an end that brings out questions and personal opinions to the table.
When do we start seeing more than what it seems?
What’s triggering us to dig more?
Perhaps an experience? Familiarity?
“From where I stand” is a subjective battlefield, but as they say, to each their own.
-Dzen Salinga
Finale Art File x ACAP
Fragments of Hope
FRAGMENTS OF HOPE
The Inner Worlds of Manila’s Marginalized Youth
FINALE ART FILE, in partnership with ACAP (Action for the Care and Development of the Poor in the Philippines) presents FRAGMENTS OF HOPE from January 9 to 30, 2026.
An exhibition of artworks created by out of school youth from the Manila’s most vulnerable communities. They are not mere paintings, they are confessions, dreams, and quiet rebellions rendered in color.
Each canvas whispers of lives interrupted, of ambitions buried beneath the weight of poverty, now unearthed through art. In these strokes, you will find resilience- raw and unvarnished – alongside the fragile beauty of hope rediscovered.
ACAP, a nonprofit committed to breaking the cycle of poverty through education, offers these young artists a lifeline. For those who left school too soon, returning is almost impossible. Instead, they find sanctuary in creation. Here, art becomes more than expression. It becomes restoration. It rebuilds confidence, rekindles self-worth, and reminds them that transformation begins with the courage to imagine again.
PHILIP ALDEFOLIO
The Ship After Unsen
