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Where Light Falls
Kristone Capistrano
August 1 - 29, 2026
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Where Light Falls
The title Where Light Falls nods beyond the path of light across a surface. It culls both a response and a
reflection on how images come into being: what they reveal, conceal, and gradually recede from the view
as light fades.
Filipino-Australian artist, working across traditional and experimental drawing, Kristone Capistrano
approaches light not as illumination alone, but as a condition in which time, materiality, and perception
converge. He foregrounds these images as tactile experiences, where layers amass through staining,
tearing, and repair, as the artist suggests, expressions that retain the traces of the human touch. These
actions allow the surface to register both gesture and duration, through charcoal or ink, and collages on
banana paper, as seen here.
The exhibition brings together five from Capistrano’s ongoing Orb series, which began in 2024. In these
greyscale drawings, the recurring orb appears in myriad forms, showing us a setting sun, a rising moon,
an eclipse, or an indeterminate celestial body. These works reflect on the evolving conditions of image-
making in an age increasingly defined by automation, rather than treating them as fixed images.
In Where Light Falls, viewers are invited to discover that looking unfolds through slowness, movement,
and partiality. Two of these drawings are suspended, quietly responding to ambient air through the
gallery. These gentle movements recall the fluid transitions characteristic of algorithmically generated
images, yet this animation is produced not through code but through the atmosphere. For the artist,
these works unfold through a unison of the wind, gravity, light, and the movement of viewers around the
space.
Capistrano walks us through a tableau of recurring globule forms seemingly hovering in these expansive,
monochromatic registers that shift between dense blacks, diffused greys, and luminous whites. Here,
meaning arises not through our possession of these images but as a sustained negotiation with them.
All in all, Where Light Falls offers a proposition that these images urge us to perceive them as sites of
negotiation. In this exhibition, they emerge through dynamic relations between the surface and the
atmosphere, and the viewer and the material, reminding us that seeing is never instantaneous but
continually shaped through encounter, movement, and duration.
- Alain Zedrick Camiling
Kristone Capistrano
Kristone Capistrano is a Filipino-Australian artist working across traditional and experimental drawing, moving image, and performance. His practice explores mortality, transience, and contemporary figuration, visualising paper as a metaphor for human skin, and mark-making as a form of human touch: a vehicle for generosity and care.
In a world of increasing AI and automation, Capistrano creates works that are decisively tactile, handmade and analogue. His early practice was driven by a fascination with the human person, creating portraits with a solidity that could not be 'swiped' away; faces rendered slowly by hand, calling the viewer to stop and behold the face of another: Look at me. I am here. I am waiting. This impulse has expanded beyond portraiture into landscapes, dance, animation and durational performance, where drawing becomes a way of returning to touch, labour and embodied attention within an increasingly screen-based world.
The death of his grandmother led him to start using Filipino brooms and household tools as alternative instruments for drawing. An homage that unites mark-making, sweeping, and erasure with shared memories of labour, sacrifice, and hospitality embedded in the Filipino imagination. Across these works, drawing becomes a way of holding what passes: a tactile act of mourning, devotion and care.
Capistrano has presented solo exhibitions and commissions across Australia and Asia, including Paper Feed, Firstdraft Gallery (2026), 101 Graham Street, PHIVE, City of Parramatta (2022), and a forthcoming permanent public artwork for the new Bradfield Metro Station (2027). His moving-image work Orb: Anima was recently named winner of the White Rabbit Gallery’s Digital Art Call-Out Program. He has undertaken residencies at Bundanon Art Museum (NSW), Emerging Islands (Philippines), Tong Lau Space (HK), and the Sheen Center (NYC), with awards including the Black Swan Prize for Portraiture, the Royal South Australian Portrait Biennale, and the Blacktown Local Artist Prize.
Upcoming projects include Where Light Falls, a solo presentation at Art Cube Gallery, Mapping Hollows, a series of drawing performances at the Vargas Museum, Manila, and Playground, a group exhibition at Hake House, Sydney. Capistrano's works are held by White Rabbit Gallery, the City of Parramatta, Blacktown Arts, The Lester Group, The Kennedy Art Foundation, King George V International School – Hong Kong, as well as in private collections in Australia, Singapore, Miami, New York, Manila and Hong Kong.
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