Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
WELBART SLOWHANDS
gray matter and silver lining
wisdom
Where does our memory go amidst illness, in experiencing trauma, throughout old age? A tormenting question Welbart began to ask when his father lost most of his memories after being hospitalized. It hurt him when his parent could not recognize him anymore. As a self-taught artist who was trained to be a nurse, he anchors his visualization on words and quotes; perhaps a bridge to the factual. The evolution of this artistic blueprint is most evident, not with the stylistic choices, but beyond what we can comprehend.
love. empathy.
Overwhelming emotional bond is affixed to the journey of grief. In the passing of Welbart’s father, there was a struggle in navigating this bereavement. Identifying with such tragedy is transformed into a unifying connection; we feel, we understand. This exhibition is an expression of reverence that grows out of longing, but also of acceptance. As they say, to be inspired by loss is a healthy way of grieving.
healing
The silver lining is difficult to catch when it momentarily appears from the skies. The kind of coping Welbart has been tenaciously pursuing is to put his faith in the wisdom of others. The centerpiece of the current presentation is a combination of sculptures and literature. Imaginably a homage to the philosophers, writers, and leaders who have shared their thoughts in writing for these thinking to exist. It may also be to preserve the individual sentiments that enter the collective sympathies. Besides, healing after death is a communal pilgrimage.
gratitude
Gray matter is physical. Silver lining is spiritual. Welbart quotes Lionel Hampton: "Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.” The artist, as he contemplates on memory and the psyche, acknowledges that one is compelled to find the balance of life in the external world and belief in the divine. What gratitude does for him is to transcend the physicality of being and affirm the sacredness of living.
JOMARI T'LEON
Snake Infested Temple
A Year of Snakes
Shedding its skin. Leaving in its place, a place.
The Character has become female, a woman.
But her molted skin hasn’t come off, she needs to push further to get out completely.
In his 2024 exhibition “Through the Woods, Across the Sea,” Jomari T’Leon fleshed out the journey of a Character — anonymous yet everybody — stuck in a stagnant place, unable to grow. Scattered across the works were sinister motifs, such as skulls, demons, and serpents —- stand-ins for obstacles that held him back.
Taking off from that body of work, he expands his visual explorations by delving deeper into the origins of the Character’s impediment itself: Fear. And with this returns the trope of the serpent, or as appropriate to the year 2025, the snake.
Snakes are feared. Snakes fear. Snakes fear snakes.
Across the canvasses, the Character embodies expressions of resentment, anticipation, concern, bewilderment, and defeat. The snake appears as an omen, whispering, lingering, and prodding her down a path she so desperately wants to escape. Such scribbles crossing her sight, flowing hair, and folds in her clothes recall a writhing. Even the mirror reflecting a mirror, reflected in another mirror evokes a metaphorical Ouroboros. With their forked tongues chanting directly into her ear, she bears a snake-infested temple.
She bears. She carries. She carries fear.
She bears. She endures. She endures fear.
In the temple, between one’s eyes and ears, time passes.
Of the temple is the temporal. Of time is the temporal.
The fear of time is the fear of the temporal.
T’Leon executes these works with the desire to unseal such a primal emotion; the realism in his depictions only secondary to his divided planes and irreverence for foregrounds, midgrounds, and backgrounds. As if disregarding time and space itself, he renders the intangible as figures and layers that are anything but flat.
The body is a place, a sacred space. The body is a temple.
Light a candle to see them writhing in front of you.
Snakes writhe, longing to shed their skin and be reborn.
From meticulous decision-making come the titles of the works. In “Chasing your Own Tail I & II,” figures of a snake navigating the canvas lend motion, perhaps futile. Sombre moods permeate “Empty Glass” and “Secret Pact,” where the figure seems to observe or ignore the other. Either frustration or shock are demonstrated by hands partly covering the face in “Here and There I & II.” And lastly, the titular snake appears, head beside temple, silently hissing — a “Trace.”
There is a phenomenon known as “dysecdysis,” when a molting snake gets stuck in its old skin, unable to move on and be somewhere else. Molting is meant to be a slow yet defined process. Any external force can cause injury. While the snake manifests as fear, as one looks in the mirror, we might find that we are the snake ourselves. Fear is what we hold on to, what we refuse to shed.
Shedding its skin. Leaving behind fear, leaving a place.
– Francisco Jin Sung Lee, Feb 2025
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Blurb:
Fear is what we hold on to, what we refuse to shed. Taking off from his 2024 exhibition “Through the Woods, Across the Sea,” Jomari T’Leon expands his visual explorations by delving deeper into his self-coined Character by way of the origins of its impediment itself: Fear. And with this returns the trope of the serpent, or as appropriate to the year 2025, the snake. “Snake Infested Temple” opens at Finale Art File on 6 March 2025.
JOHN ISRAEL ACUÑA
Echoes Through the Branches
This collection, "Echoes Through the Branches," is a heartfelt tribute to the shared aspirations of my mother and I. Each painting reflects not only the beauty of the woods, but also the dreams that have been passed down through generations. As I explored these landscapes, I discovered the intertwining of our hopes and desires. Her visions became my own, and guided me through life’s journey. Within these woods, I stand as the wood that fuels our family's fire, the embodiment of strength, and the provider of sustenance. From the struggles we face, a flower blossoms - symbolizing the beauty and resilience of our challenges. The ribbon wrapped around the wood represents the balance between strength and softness. The solid wood and the delicate ribbon symbolize the resilience and tenderness that coexist with family life’s beauty and challenges. This exhibition invites you to walk with me through the branches of our shared dreams, to celebrate the enduring connection between past and present, and to harness the power of aspiration that shapes our paths. (Ria Mangahas)
DEX FERNANDEZ
Spectrum So Far So Good
Dex Fernandez wanders through another chapter of life, moving from 22ESB75CC to 120.
In his previous exhibition at the tall gallery, he chronicled an eventful two years of death, violence, and healing through a maximalist depiction of frenzy and limitless energy. A form of catharsis, he was able to push the boundaries of his art-making by visually capturing a sprawling universe. Reality would have to immediately begin though. Years pass by so quickly and this current exhibition perhaps becomes a sensing of sorts.
How are you in the current moment? How are you in the grand scheme of things?
Spectrum of So Far So Good is a reflexive moment. We are taken into a journey where we can enjoy speculations of a narrative made possible by transformation of figures and vectors that are both ambitious and deliberate. Sometimes viewers can be distracted by the artist’s vivacious demeanor, but Fernandez is deeply concerned with the formal and aesthetic qualities of his art. It’s exciting to see how the new works display technical skill and thoughtful conceptualization. The contradicting position of exposing and cloaking becomes necessary for the storyteller to keep us off balance, a feeling that is both uncomfortable and exhilarating. As an artist who strives to always improve himself, the obsessive consistency is palpable. Still very much present is what writer Carlomar Daoana previously described as a “movement, dance, the impulse to connect and disengage… expanding from the streets, to the bars, to the hectic textures of cities, to the evolving spheres populated with flashing gizmos and signs and motifs—staggering in scope, unstoppable in its expansion, hypnotic in its repetitions.” Notice this time there is restraint, breathing space, a consciousness of being present.
“It is this mode of apprehension above all that governs the new deciphering that we have given of the subject’s relations to that which makes his condition.” This was written by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan talking about chance encounters—an aspect of repetition that interrupts. The artist’s ‘apprehension’ becomes an apparatus to spotlight the moments he tends to romanticize and memorialize captured from his chance encounters with people, objects, scenes, and energies. His current condition, preoccupied by his queerness, anxieties on and of maturing, fresh ventures and adventures, becomes a landscape for ‘the new deciphering.’ The two-dimensional works are animated; each artwork a cel. Characters enter the frame and the exits are another round of introductions. These artistic decisions and processes are laborious and intricate. They compel us to appreciate every chapter of existence; we reflect not only on the phases of the artist’s creative life, but our own as well.
Hope you are (also) in this spectrum of so far, so good.
Con Cabrera
PAM QUINTO
The Weight of Being, A Living Thing Cracked Open
FAYE ABANTAO
To Conquer a Home
Home is a complicated concept, often riddled with clichés. Home is where the heart is. There is no place like home. For Faye Abantao, home is her anchor for artistic production. She uses paper, old photographs, and everyday objects gathered from her home. More potently, her artistic growth evolves as her lived experience within her home shifts. As a child, it was the walls she colored in creative expression. As an adult and developing artist, it was the bits and pieces of peeling paint, slowly dilapidating over time–transcending toward portraiture and installations. Now, the home unravels with children grown and parents aging.
Faces are now missing from Abantao’s canvas. They are no longer portrayed but are watching outside the canvas. Instead, a slowly creeping decay unfurls–an unopened door, an empty chair, a pile of boxes, and wilting flowers. It is as if time stands still while the moment of contemplation is already gone. There is quiet waiting, with life’s imprints standing still in constant limbo of both belonging and displacement.
The home changes. Inevitably, children grow. They marry and move out. They explore careers and other locales. There is sadness as the familiar becomes memories. Sharing a meal, boisterous noises, and being in the same space are safe, familiar, and wrapped up in warm comfort. But with time comes growth, then age and the present transforms into remembrances. The question hangs in the air, to stand still or move? Slowly, things crumble, yet the feelings persist and endure. (Portia Placino)
About the Artist
Faye Abantao is a visual artist based in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, Philippines. She looks into memories, contemplation, and personal experiences as trajectories in her artistic practice. Recent works involved experimentation in collage and weaving as processes of expressing thoughts and inner turmoil. She was the recipient of the Karen H. Montinola Award in 2021. To Conquer a Home is her sixth solo exhibition in over a decade of creative practice. Aside from numerous local and international group exhibitions, Abantao expanded her perspective through residencies in Malaysia, Germany, and South Korea.
GROUP SHOW
Moth and the Flame
Finitude and Other Spectres A.X. Ledesma
I. ’A fellowship with essence; till we shine / full alchemised and free of space ’[1]
Sing, Muse, of that which is and is not, of that which is momentarily cloaked in each modality of vibrance, of that which dissipates once its position changes, of that which holds no position, of that which distributes itself across the boundless sea of emptiness, driven time and again along a multitude of indeterminate paths, tracing an incomprehensible pattern along undiscovered creases in the fabric of time. Sing of that which allows the world around it to bend, that which finds itself in all things, that which comes apart to become a part of all that it is not.
II. ‘hurled headlong flaming from the Ethereal Sky’ [2]
into the vast world beneath this world,
into the margins of linear history,
into a different scene,
into its point of origin,
into the crucible of an uncreated consciousness,
into substance,
into a still point amidst impermanence,
into a relentless trajectory,
into a line on the brink of erasure,
into what is both real and unreal,
into the binds of time,
into the flicker of an image,
into a curve in the air,
into the material world,
into the periphery,
into itself,
into what has been conceived as its inverse,
into nothing,
into something.
III. ‘I look up and see / nothing crosses heaven’ [3]
The expanse of the unyielding firmament, occluded by thick fog, punctured only by enclaves of constellations or objects mistaken for stars shivering in the distance amidst an endless sprawl of emptiness plunged into the depths of mineral silence, interrupted by minuscule signs of activity, by a tremor in the atmosphere, by an apparition, by a light that bends, by some vague movement of a thing yet to be identified. In the crepuscular dawn, vision folds in on itself. In the ceaseless, terminal gloaming, there is only this gesture, this suggestion of change, this gradual disappearance and reappearance.
IV. Impressions of a World in Flux
‘The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilised forms.’ [4] ’We are not in the world, we become with the world. ’[5] ‘The body is a source. Nothing more.’ [6] ’The body receives gratuity. The world gives graciously, disinterestedly, asking for nothing back, expecting nothing in return.’ [7] ’The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and [the] body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other… . Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.’ [8] ’Everything is vision, becoming,’ [9] ‘but seeing only binds the vision to the eye. ’[10] ‘Undergo the quiet treatment of the five senses. It is enough to accept what is gratuitously given.’ [11]
V. As of 04 January 2025, 45,717 dead [12].
On occasion, nothing follows.
—
[1] John Keats, ‘Endymion’, 1818.
[2] John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, 1667.
[3] Jenny Hval, ‘Year of Sky’ in Classic Objects, 4AD, 2022.
[4] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press, 2007.
[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. Columbia University Press, 1996.
[6] Eavan Boland, ‘Anna Liffey’ in New and Collected Poems. W. W. Norton, 2008.
[7] Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. Bloomsbury, 2008.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
[10] Deerhunter, ‘Agoraphobia’ in Microcastle, 4AD, 2008.
[11] Serres, The Five Senses.
[12] The human toll of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
RANELLE DIAL
Random Memories
At first glance, Ranelle Dial’s exhibit, Random Memories, appears to depict domestic interiors steeped in familiarity: storied spaces adorned with bookcases, luxuriant furniture, and the quiet intimacy of home. Yet, these spaces resist settling into the tangible. They reveal themselves instead as dream-like evocations, where reality wavers and gives way to the extraordinary. In one painting, a woman peers through a doorway that extends endlessly into infinity. In another, the floor transforms into waves, an undulating ocean beneath the room. Elsewhere, walls subtly wobble, as though destabilized by an unseen force.
“What is familiar yet is elusive,” the artist explains, lies at the heart of her work. She seeks to capture that which is there but not exactly there, perpetually hovering between the conscious and unconscious. Through Dial’s lens, painting transcends mere description, becoming a mode of transformation—a way to reveal how the world we perceive exists not as an objective reality but as a product of the brain’s intricate circuitry.
Memory, Dial suggests, colors everything we see. Even the solid presence of a book held squarely in one’s hands is shaped by subjective interpretation. “Scenario perspectives within the works symbolize the continuity of thought, where past and present intertwine, blurring the boundaries of time,” she reflects. Her paintings weave these temporal threads into visual narratives, evoking a liminal space where perception and recollection collide.
This interplay between memory and reality is further underscored by Dial’s use of puzzle pieces. Reclaimed as a palette board, these fragments once cohered into complete images but now bear only trace elements of pigment—a metaphor for the fractured, ephemeral nature of memory and existence. Like reality itself, the puzzle is dismantled, leaving behind vestiges of what once was.
Random Memories challenges our relationship to the world before us. It invites us to question the solidity of what we deem “truth” and to reflect on the fluid boundaries between memory, perception, and existence. Dial’s work urges us to embrace the slippages of reality, where the familiar becomes elusive, and the seemingly tangible dissolves into the realm of the infinite.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
BEMBOL DELA CRUZ
Only the Wearer
In Only the Wearer, Bembol De La Cruz delves into the layered significations of the boot, a potent emblem that traverses the realms of "strength, power, and adventure"—traits often coded as masculine ideals. The artist interrogates these associations, framing the boot as an object steeped in historical, socio-economic, and personal narratives.
Drawing inspiration from Mona Hatoum’s Roadworks and Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, De La Cruz situates the boot within the contexts of labor and mobility. For Hatoum and Antin, the boot became a symbol tied to the working class—an index of movement, endurance, and the often overlooked struggles of everyday life. De La Cruz extends this discourse by presenting the boots in states of disrepair: worn down, scuffed, and even missing a shoelace. These working boots serve as stand-ins for their wearers, encapsulating the relentless grind of labor and the absence of luxury to replace what is broken.
“Boots,” De La Cruz states, “reflect themes of socio-economic disparity: they symbolize the promises of upward mobility often unfulfilled, the struggles of unemployment, and the reality of poor housing.” The boots become metaphors for unrealized aspirations, embodying a tension between the ideal and the actual—between the promise of progress and the resistance of systemic inequities.
In a striking juxtaposition, De La Cruz pairs the depiction of boots with body bags. When viewed together, the body bags cast a grim shadow over the narrative of the boots. They prompt viewers to ask: Did the wearers achieve what they set out to do? Or did their dreams remain elusive, overshadowed by the weight of circumstance?
Ultimately, Only the Wearer compels viewers to confront “the tension between the promise of progress and the realities of the human condition.” De La Cruz’s work reminds us that the wearers of boots navigate a world resistant to alternative ways of living, where the burden of survival often eclipses the hope for transformation.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana