Sketch Marks 4

Lines map territories, chronicle happenstance, or take detours into the absurd. It can record what is seen, unsettle what is known, or turn an accident into an idea. In Philippine contemporary art, where painting often takes center stage, lines bring life to drawings that constantly push the boundaries of making, one mark at a time.
Launched in 2020, Sketch Marks has become one of Art Cube Gallery’s most anticipated biennial exhibitions. Curated by Elmer Borlongan, this fourth iteration brings together sixteen artists under the guiding principle of not a day without a line. In Sketch Marks 4, drawing is not just a preparatory exercise. It is a way of thinking, testing, and taking stock of the world.
Nature offers no shortage of material. Arvi Fetalvero fragments drapery, leaves, and trees into segmented forms in Fractured Landscapes, while FM Monteverde’s Ode to the Island looks to the sea’s vastness and capacity to sustain life. Khervin John Gallandez takes a darker turn in The Grove, where shadows and darkness remind us of our own mortality.
Other artists draw straight into the mess of contemporary life. DengCoy Miel’s Pinoy Kristo places Jesus doomscrolling beside familiar emblems of vice, while a diminutized Rizal buckles beneath the weight of the cross, a burden, the sacrifice of heroic gestures pervading history and its accounts. Jonathan Madeja’s Tahanan finds shelter in a sea snail shell, a makeshift home that echoes the unsettled lives of both hermit crabs and unhoused people, artists included. In Thomas Daquioag’s Stranded, a boy perches on a black and yellow striped post amid floodwaters and unfinished infrastructure as tentacles creep into the image, precarity approaching into visible threat.
Bodies, too, refuse to stay neatly contained. Iggy Rodriguez’s Quiet Seam and Gravity of Ease leave skin, cellulite, folds, bulges, and wrinkles vivid and unretouched by digital blurring techniques, with preliminary sketches showing motion echoing instead of mistakes. Ronson Culibrina’s Mother, meanwhile, appears obscured beneath painstakingly detailed layers of fishnet, questioning webbed traps imposed on maternity.
Line-making and drawing remain open to disruption. Borlongan works loose brushes, splashes, and blots of coffee stains and inks into his precise lines in Breaktime and Boy Tiyan, letting chance interrupt the discipline of sketching in-depth characters while meditating on nonchalance and the power of choice in picking which color best goes where. Renato Habulan’s mastery of drawing gives his bocetos for Traslasyon (with the added treat of cut-out translucence) and Bulong ng Alon (two versions, with accompanying much-needed measurements visualizing the magnanimity of the envisioned pieces) the finish of independent works instead of the scraggly thumbs usually delivered by artists in the heat of configuring composition. In Mike Adrao’s Patterns of Perception I and II, intricate acanthus scrollwork coyly covers viscerality peeking out of white spaces and curlicues, complicating looking for viewers to reap more immensely satisfying rewards.
Elsewhere, drawing registers both loss and attachment. Mariano Ching’s Shambles evokes a flood’s aftermath, while Carry On places a raft bearing speakers on the water, music persisting against the threat of submersion. Mariel Garcia’s The Pleasure, by contrast, gathers cherished objects beneath a dark acrylic wash, preserving the small things that make life bearable. Clearing Index by Henrielle Baltazar Pagkaliwangan dwells on wiping and swiping off both dirt and pencil marks.
Absurdity gets its turn. Melvin Culaba’s rubber-chicken finger antics and portrait of a slovenly figure in power turn spectacle into political ridicule. Victor Balanon’s Rehearsal for Extinction unfolds in cinematic vistas, propelled by gangster vehicles and figures either driving or showing bursts of passion amid quixotic adventures.
Taken together, the works show drawing to be more than pre-work doodlings or record of things both seen and imagined. Lines can describe, distort, conceal, question, or simply follow the pleasure of making. We take the line for a walk, but are pleasantly surprised when it pulls us towards what we never expected: pressure shifts, forms accumulate, and accidents open unanticipated paths. What emerges are paroxysms of action and evidence of thought, immediacy unfolding through the artist’s hand, yet boasting of permanence if treated to decades of care.
Sketch Marks 4 invites us to look closely at that poiesis and at the limitless, multiversal directions a line can take. It may begin as a single gesture, but it can, by all means of inspiration and mediums, take on a life all its own. Or many lives, all artful, all profound, all unnervingly beautiful.