We're All Going to Die Anyway

Wyndelle Remonde's recent works push his visual language to its limits. His practice has long embraced
the ironic sensibilities of lowbrow art, where cartoon imagery often functions as satire, nostalgia, or
detached humor. In We're Going To Die Anyway, Remonde's eighth solo exhibition, those familiar visual
codes carry a different weight. Irony gives way to urgency as every image is propelled by the simple
realization that time is finite. Painting, for Remonde, becomes an insistence on being present. "Life is too short not to do the things that make us happy," he says. "We're all going to die anyway, so we might as well enjoy life."

Drawing from graffiti, screen printing, comics, and animation, Remonde builds images that communicate
with immediate clarity amid the visual noise of everyday life. Saturated colors, bold contours, and familiar
cartoon forms give the paintings an immediacy borrowed from street culture, where images must
communicate before they are contemplated. Humor, tenderness, anxiety, and absurdity coexist within the
same pictorial space.

Recurring symbols anchor this language. A crow appears repeatedly throughout the exhibition, silently
observing the unfolding scenes with unreadable black eyes. A flaming heart burns with impossible
intensity, refusing to extinguish despite overwhelming odds, whether carried, suspended in the air, or
volleyed across a pickleball court. Equally persistent is Juan Tamaraw, one among Remonde's army of alter
egos. Part laborer, part folk hero, Juan Tamaraw wields a pencil as both tool and weapon,
embodying the artist's practice of making, teaching, and painting within his community in Argao,
Cebu, where his Studio 201 Gallery is based. Another familiar figure moves through the paintings,
perpetually carrying, building, climbing, working, or even Sailing through Purgatory. These multiple selves
are not fragmented identities but parallel lives, each pursuing the next unknown adventure. Taken
together, these form a personal mythology where labor, resilience, companionship, and mortality
continually overlap.

In PAINt, the artist sits before his easel, entangled in twisting thorned vines while painting. He grits his
teeth and carries on despite his obvious discomfort. Elsewhere, his masked alter ego flies a kite shaped
like a grinning Grim Reaper across a brilliant green field, transforming death into something acknowledged
but no longer feared. I'm Still Here presents a massive blue face with a pencil tucked behind its ear,
proclaiming, in a vivid orange speech bubble, "I'm still here 'coz of my Art." Beheading Goliath portrays a
giant slayer staring into oblivion, pausing only briefly before the next impossible task. The exhibition repeatedly returns to the outdoors. In Organic Camper, a group of friends bond near a pitched tent while preparing for coffee brews over an open fire. In Off to the Unknown, a bicycle cuts through tropical landscapes alongside steadfast companions. In Ride the Tide, the figure surfs atop a cross across waves of skulls beneath a blood-red sky. Nature becomes less a destination than a space continually revisited through painting.

Working within the constraints of illness and an unforgiving medical schedule, Remonde paints against
time itself. Yet We're Going To Die Anyway never dwells on suffering or meek surrender. It transforms
mortality into something vibrant, humorous, and insistently alive. Neon colors, rainbow portals, carabao
masks, and opened chests sprouting plants, pink flames, or ghouls become declarations that happiness is
discovered through chaos rather than despite it. Ultimately, We're Going To Die Anyway argues that the
urgent act is not simply to endure, but to keep making, to keep raging, and to stubbornly follow whatever keeps the heart ablaze.