Panaghoy

In the encroaching darkness of our present time, structured by the stark inequities of the nation’s political economy, it may seem redundant to return to the heavy realities that have long shadowed our collective memory. Yet Renato Habulan’s practice, tempered in the crucible of the 1970s dictatorship, reveals how these brute conditions endure, most visceral in the vigilante killings of the drug war. In Panaghoy, Habulan gathers death not as closure but as passage, a site from which to knock upon the doors of conscience, making visible the grief and sorrow that throb within these unhealed wounds of history.

For this exhibition, Habulan unveils an installation, a series of bocetos, and a set of larger paintings. His installation, an assemblage of wax and wood, is an extension into the sculptural register, where remembrance and mourning take on corporeal density transfigured into forms at once fragile and luminous. In the bocetos, chromatic contrasts pierce through the compressed pigments, with their sharp and thickly laid strokes behaving like visual heartbeats. These chromatic incisions, carried into the larger paintings, find further pulsation through the translucent strata of wax, opening veils of depth that fracture and suspend perception. In this play of opacity and transparency, Habulan makes tangible the gravity of his subjects while exposing the paradoxes that underlie them: the burden of history rendered both material and spectral.

Amidst the imagery of death, Habulan’s works conjure pregnant moments, births wrested from endings, where life reaches a pinnacle through sorrow-laden and violently tender points of transitions.