Sampalataya

In Sampalataya, Max Balatbat returns to the neighborhood that made him—a place in Caloocan where desperation was part of the daily rhythm, and yet, somehow, prayer still found its way through. This solo exhibition is an act of reckoning: with faith, with survival, with the complicated dignity of lives lived in the margins.

As a child, Balatbat’s family erected a small chapel in the middle of the chaos. It was neither grand nor sanctified by institution, but it became a site of quiet congregation. Neighbors arrived not in their Sunday best, but as they were—prostitutes, gun-for-hires, laborers, mothers. Each offered a prayer: for safety, for success, for something to hold onto. It didn’t matter who they were or what they did; what mattered was the gesture—the reach toward something beyond.

This early memory anchors Balatbat’s art. His works are laden with the textures of real life, not sanitized or symbolic, but stubbornly material. He uses burlap, pillow stuffing, railroad spikes, salvaged wood, used canvas, rope, tiles, cement—elements that carry their own stories of use, wear, and origin. These objects are not backdrops but active agents in his visual language, part of the patchwork that holds memory and meaning together. For Balatbat, a work must have layers and scars. It must carry weight.

Recently, he immersed himself in a cenaculo—a traditional Passion play performed during Holy Week, where
participants reenact the sufferings of Christ, sometimes even taking on self-flagellation. Balatbat chose not to remain a distant observer. Instead, he participated, feeling each lash, each moment of shared ritual pain. In doing so, he came to understand the deeply human impulse behind the act: to suffer as currency, to offer pain as prayer.

But Sampalataya doesn’t accept faith at face value. The exhibition questions the performance of belief—what is ritual, and what is real? What is truly asked in the silence of a bowed head? Are we bargaining, pretending, hoping? Balatbat suggests that faith is not given—it is forged. Scraped together from the rubble of our brokenness, our guilt, our longing.

In one corner of the show, a mechanized work swings a whip rhythmically between two suspended bags—one filled with money, the other with rice. The movement is absurd, violent, and deliberate. It gestures to the everyday pendulum of devotion and desperation: the flagellant’s pain might be for daily bread, or it might be for a payday. In either case, need drives the ritual.

Here, Balatbat is at his most vulnerable. Textile patches evoke bandages, as if each artwork were an attempt to dress a wound that still bleeds. The act of making becomes a way of healing, or at least acknowledging the injury. In his raw use of materials—acrylic skin, epoxy, enamel, coffee-stained canvas—there is no pretense of purity. The works breathe with complexity, like the people who once gathered in the chapel of his childhood: imperfect, fervent, and utterly human.