Where the Land Becomes Stills

In Where the Land Becomes Still, one of the two exhibitions opening 2026 for Art Cube, Jep Dizon offers his latest exploration of landscape painting—one that resists the genre’s habitual calm and instead presses it into unfamiliar territory. What he terms “hybrid landscape art” unfolds through the careful interweaving of landscape with other painterly traditions, notably still life and portraiture, allowing scenes to hover between place, presence, and objecthood.

Rendered in vivid color and sharpened by stark detail, Dizon’s tableaus resemble carefully staged moments from a surreal film. Light appears unusually lucid, air almost tactile, as if each scene has been paused at the precise instant before something shifts. Yet these images do not resolve into a single narrative. Their power lies in suspension: figures and objects coexist without fully explaining themselves, producing a quiet tension that lingers.

A man swaddled in yellow cloth, a flower enclosed within a fishbowl, a bubble trapping the image of a dilapidated shed—such elements generate a visual dissonance that feels dreamlike yet alert. One moves through these works as through a dream punctured by moments of clarity, where recognition is immediate but meaning remains unsettled.

This deliberate estrangement is central to the artist’s intent. By disrupting familiar associations, the images work to refresh perception itself, loosening the grip of visual habits that have grown tired or predictable. Reality, for Dizon, behaves less like a fixed structure than a fabric—porous, malleable, and susceptible to change. In the still-life works, statues appear to glitch or waver, suggesting that even what seems solid and known is subject to fluctuation.

Painting becomes, in this sense, a site of encounter rather than escape. As the artist notes, “the work asks us to reflect on what stands before us and to allow it to teach what it must, whether emerging from order or chaos.” Though the images feel suspended between worlds, Dizon insists that the aim is not withdrawal from reality but the resolve to face it directly and let it pass through the body and mind.

In his words, “storms arrive not as punishment, but as a means of clearing the path.” Within Where the Land Becomes Still, stillness itself is not an end point—it is a charged pause, where perception resets and the ground beneath vision subtly shifts.