Rueda | April 6 - 27, 2024 Rueda Mark Laza April 6 - 27, 2024 DSC06210.JPG DSC06230.JPG DSC06208.JPG DSC06210.JPG 1/6 View Catalogue Video Press Release Rueda Ayon sa eksibisyon ni Mark Laza Paikutin ang ruleta Na nakatunghay ang mata sa iyo At ituturo ang mga posibilidad Ng uniberso. Tatlong tanong Ang magdidistrongka Ng pinto ng kamalayan: Sino, Alin, Paano, Ngayong gulong Ng pagtatansya ang pipili, Saang mesa isusugal Ang kapalaran? Dito ka manahan Sa silid ng pag-iisip At banggitin: Ang totoong orakulo ay ako. Kung saan ipipihit Ang malay, Doon kikidlat sa lupa Ang sangandaan. Magkakapakpak tayo. Malalagas ang araw Sa malillit na hibla Ng liwanag. Walang ihip Ang makapapatay Sa igting na lampara Ng loob. Kahit sa tigib Ng dilim Nasasapo ang talim Ng talinghaga. Paikutin ang ruleta Na nakatunghay ang mata sa iyo At ituturo ang mga posibilidad ng uniberso. Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

Gathering | May 9 - 30, 2026 Gathering Martin Honasan May 9 - 30, 2026 DSC01747.JPG 1/9 View Catalogue Video Press Release Gathering brings together sculptural works, two large-scale canvases, and a series of works on paper. Across the exhibition, traditional acrylic painting is combined with reclaimed fabrics—old T-shirts, canvas, and a tablecloth—hardened, collaged, and reworked. These materials carry prior use within them, allowing each piece to hold traces of touch, repetition, and time. At the center of the exhibition are two large works, Moveable Feast and The Uttermost Parts, which follow a shared structure. Each pairs a hand sculpture, placed on a pedestal in front of the painting and slightly lower in height, with a horizontal diptych. One panel (60 × 20 inches) bears accumulated paint from previous works, while the adjoining panel (60 × 72 inches) was completed this year. This format brings together what is carried over and what is newly made, allowing past and present surfaces to meet within a single image. In Moveable Feast, a fragmented figure stretches across both panels. Constructed from collaged fabric, the body remains visibly incomplete, like a statue with broken limbs. A tablecloth spans the composition, draped and folded as if in the process of being put away. Positioned just in front of the canvas, the hand casts a shadow that folds back into the image, extending the work into the viewer’s space. Despite its fragmentation, the piece remains open—its elements dispersed yet still held together by gesture and memory. The title draws from the term “moveable feast,” which originates in the liturgical calendar, where certain feast days shift each year rather than remaining fixed. More broadly, it suggests something portable—an experience or memory carried across time and place. Here, it reflects the transience of shared moments and the ways they persist in altered forms. The tablecloth, used during family meals throughout the pandemic, anchors the work in lived experience, recalling gatherings that gradually dissolved as routines resumed. The Uttermost Parts, while mirroring this structure, turns inward. A hand sculpture faces a narrower 60 × 20 inch panel marked by accumulated paint and a larger adjoining panel that is almost entirely submerged in black. From this darkened surface, remnants of earlier paint and texture remain exposed, forming faint, residual shapes that suggest a torso and fragments of limbs. The head of this partially revealed body is a self-portrait, emerging from and dissolving back into the ground. Where Moveable Feast disperses, this work contains—its image less assembled than excavated, as if drawn out from layers of concealment. The reused canvas of the larger panel reinforces this sense of return, erasure, and reconstitution. The accompanying series, Gatherings, consists of five 30 × 25 inch mixed-media works on paper. Fragments of the same tablecloth and worn shirts form their surfaces, over which rough, unfinished portraits of myself and my wife emerge and recede into the patterned ground. These smaller works echo the larger pieces, holding intimacy and distance in tension, as images surface and fall back into the material that carries them. Across the exhibition, acts of assembling, breaking, covering, and revealing become ways of approaching wholeness. The works move between dispersion and containment, absence and presence, suggesting that completeness is not restored intact but encountered in fragments, through persistence. These pieces are, in this sense, meditations on finding sustenance in the midst of lack—on how physical struggle can open into another form of nourishment. The materials themselves bear this out: worn, handled, and repurposed, they endure, carrying forward what has been used, tested, and lived through. The exhibition draws, quietly, from the passage in Deuteronomy that recalls a people led through the wilderness—humbled, made to hunger, and then fed with what they did not know. “Man does not live by bread alone,” but by what sustains beyond the visible and the immediate. In this context, gathering becomes not only an act of bringing things together, but of remembering: tracing the way something is held, provided for, and made whole over time, even as it passes through states of fragmentation and need.

Pastilan | March 13 - April 4, 2026 Pastilan Rey Labarento March 13 - April 4, 2026 1/7 View Catalogue Video Press Release OMP! (Oh My Pastilan!) Duality in life does not necessarily mean two distinct beings or situations. Sometimes it’s the same thing seen differently, meant differently. Visayan visual artist Rey Labarento explores this relationship in the exhibition “Pastilan.” In keeping with his previous works, Negros Island provincial life is depicted with much generosity in Labarento’s works, from people at basketball games, the local plazas, and anywhere around the town of Valencia and Dumaguete. Each of the paintings is a scene brimming with emotion, hence the expression “pastilan” Now this reaction can go both ways. It can be a “wow!” or a “tsk!” In “Drunk Man and the Scorers,” you can almost hear the children say “pastilan sabaa nimo kol” calling out the noisy uncle heckling from the bleachers, while in “Partners in Crime,” it’s the simple pastilan joy of a beer with your best friend. Next door it was “Game Over” after the card game, and manong mutters “pastilan walay swerte,” as he wonders if he can ask for a cigarette. Meanwhile, strength in numbers is a common tendency in the country — both the city and the countryside, much aligned with Philippine horror vacui aesthetics. In the Visayas, the habal-habal is a motorcyle ride where capacity is pushed to the limits, sometimes adding wooden planks to make extra seats. It easily elicits a “pastilan layo layo pa ang byahe” for being careless, but to the “Family Trip,” it’s a “pastilan” for the excitement. One of the more interesting scenes is from “Outdoor Massage” where one sees a pair of hands on a tree on the edge of the painting. This stems from the belief that the negative forces drawn out from the massage guest, when transferred to nature, helps the tree grow. It sounds “pastilan hinaya ra” until you realize, it’s not so far from humans exhaling carbon dioxide which becomes plant food. Being in Negros, a sense of adventure seems innate to anyone, whether you’re a local or “nadagit.” Trekking and running culture has always been around — pastilan fun until your feet are sore, and it becomes pastilan “Runner’s Foot.” “Ninja Boy” is a throwback to those times when, after watching a favorite superhero tv show, the kids would play around the house or outdoors, and the parents could only sigh “pastilan ning bataa.” In this era of phone picture documentation, moments are decided quickly “Pastilan! Chadaa uyy!” Whether it’s a photo of your friend “Framing You” or a mirror selfie “Picture Picture.” That moment your *slightly* tipsy friend says “Moses” while hanging out at the local river is the pastilan shot of the day. Of course, in some situations “pastilan” is only really a good feeling or a bad feeling, but we can’t deny its versatility as a way of expression. “Pastilan” as well links us to our greater Asian family, where there are words in the everyday vernacular that have a plethora of meanings that rely on context and experience. “Mai pen rai” in Thailand generally means “it’s okay” but has become multi-layered as a response. “Yabai” in Japanese previously meant a negative situation, but is now also used for strong immediate emotions, especially when something is really good. Rey Labarento in each of his exhibitions, especially outside his hometown, gently highlights that which makes Visayan culture meaningful and unique. While his style appears to fall under the characterizations of Naïve Art, they are actually complex layerings of human identity formed by the Negros mountains, the Visayas oceans, and the Dumaguete sun, to which I say: “Pastilan what an artist!” -Francisco Jin Sung Lee

Kapalaran | October 4 - November 1, 2025 Kapalaran Jonathan Dangue October 4 - November 1, 2025 DSC05581.webp 1/4 View Catalogue Video Press Release In Kapalaran, Jonathan Dangue turns his gaze toward the ancient cycle of the Chinese zodiac, reimagining its twelve animals not as static signs but as beings charged with spirit and movement. Each creature bears its familiar temperament: the pig breaks into a wide grin, the horse gathers its strength with forelegs raised and mane unfurled, the rooster caught in the instant of crowing, summoning the day. These presences are not merely sculptural forms but vessels of character, animated by their symbolic roles across centuries of belief and tradition. Dangue shapes his animals as assemblages of found objects, infused with attributes of fortune and prosperity. Among these are yuanbao—the boat-shaped ingots of wealth—and the pierced brass coins of Chinese lore, talismans once strung together to ward off misfortune. By embedding such emblems into his creatures, the artist situates them within a continuum of material and spiritual aspiration. In striking counterpoint to these animated forms are the artist’s own hands, cast in resin, amber-hued and luminous. Placed downward with fingertips touching the surface, they serve as both pedestal and anchor. They hold aloft the zodiac animals, yet also draw them back to the earth, reminding us that whatever celestial order the heavens might decree, the grounding of existence remains in human touch. Binding these figures is a coil of wire that spirals around hand and animal alike, as if tracing an unseen current of energy. It is at once tether and conduit, suggesting the luminous cord of destiny that threads through our lives. Dangue’s Kapalaran meditates on this tension: between forces believed to govern from above and the agency we carry within our grasp. The sculptures insist that while fate may be written in the stars, destiny is equally shaped by the weight and gesture of our own hands. -Carlomar Arcangel Daoana Jonathan Dangue Jonathan Dangue (b. 1984) is a Filipino sculptor, painter, and architect renowned for transforming brass into textured, expressive art that reflects both philosophical and emotive themes. Licensed in architecture, he won the Grand Prize in the 2011 and 2012 Metrobank Art & Design Excellence (MADE) competitions—first for sculpture with “Walang Pinanghahawakang Anuman sa Palad” and then in the architecture category. Dangue’s works balance intuition and planning, often incorporating everyday material like brass into his visual vocabulary. His pieces have been featured in solo and group shows such as Kabuluhan ng Buhay and Monumental Abstracts, and he has also designed the Department of Health’s regional office in Davao and created a commemorative MADE sculpture “Binhi”

Terraforming | April 11 - May 2, 2026 Terraforming Nina Garibay April 11 - May 2, 2026 1/7 View Catalogue Video Press Release Lay of the Land “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” — Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias In Terraforming, Nina Garibay constructs a visual archaeology of power, how it is formed, imposed, inherited, and ultimately undone. Drawing from archival images of Egyptian, Bronze Age, and medieval Christian origin, many sourced from institutional collections such as the British Museum, the Vatican Museum and the Cairo Museum, her paintings assemble civilizations into composite fields where time collapses and authority reveals both its continuity and its limits. The exhibition begins with a proposition: culture is engineered under conditions of power. What appears as tradition, belief, or identity is often the result of systems imposed to stabilize and organize society. Terraforming, in this sense, is not limited to the physical shaping of land. It names the broader capacity of power to reshape reality at scale. Land becomes territory. Territory becomes system. System becomes belief. What begins as an effort to establish order gradually produces structures that extend control over both environment and population. This process raises a fundamental question: Is culture shaped by force, or does it mutate through contact? The works suggest that what is often described as syncretism is not a neutral blending, but the residue of systems imposed and later adapted. Forms persist even as their original meanings shift. What survives is not the intact system, but its fragments, reorganized under new conditions. The material basis of this process is never far from view. The images Garibay draws from were themselves carved from stone, cast from earth, constructed from the ground up to give visible form to authority. In The Golden Hawk, dominion is aligned with divine sanction, recalling how rulers anchored power in the natural and the sacred. In Priestly Family, belief is stabilized through repetition, lineage, and institutional continuity. Authority is not only declared, it is reproduced. Yet even as these systems consolidate, they begin to detach from their foundations. This is most evident in Fondation, where the figure appears suspended, its base removed, its grounding uncertain. The work points to a stage at which structures remain intact but no longer hold. Authority persists, but its origin has thinned. The system continues, but without stable ground. Historical precedent makes this condition legible. Egypt, once a center of immense power, was successively absorbed into other empires. Its forms endured, but its sovereignty did not. The British Empire, which later collected and archived many of these remnants, followed a comparable trajectory. Its dominance depended on the control of circulation, trade routes, and strategic passages such as the Suez Canal. When that control weakened, the system it sustained began to falter. Whoever controls the terrain controls the narrative, but terrain itself is never fixed. This instability is brought into the present in The Tower. Its form recalls the Chrysler Building, a monument to industrial ambition and financial power. Yet here it appears less as a celebration than as a structure under pressure. The tower rises from the same logic that produced earlier monuments: expansion, consolidation, and the projection of permanence. But within that logic lies overextension. Systems expand because they are built to do so. Expansion generates strain. Strain leads to rupture. The collapse of the tower is not an anomaly, but a structural outcome. In this light, terraforming emerges not as a singular act, but as an ongoing condition. Power reorganizes reality, stabilizes it, extends it, and in doing so produces the conditions for its own instability. What follows is not disappearance, but transformation. The system collapses, yet the terrain it reshaped remains altered. Forms endure. Symbols persist. Meanings are reassigned. Each system leaves behind structures and meanings that persist beyond its control. If the remnants of past civilizations now appear to us as fragments, rigid, monumental, and partially understood, the future offers no clearer resolution. It remains a terra incognita, shaped by the same processes of control, adaptation, and collapse. What rises will not remain. What falls will not fully vanish. Each new order begins not from nothing, but from what has already been transformed. -BG

AYAW KO NA MAGING TAO Doktor Karayom May 29 - June 19, 2021 View Catalogue Video Link AYAW KO NA MAGING TAO BY DOKTOR KARAYOM Nakakapagod na din minsan Titigil muna ako sa pag galaw Wala muna akong iisipin kundi wala.. Hindi muna ako magsasalita… Sa araw na ito isa akong bangko, Pader na nakatayo Ako yung kumukulo pag malapit na maluto Isa akong kutsara na iyong isusubo ako yung telepono mo na laging hawak yung bakod sa lupa na malawak ako yung bitak sa pader na baku baku kulay na itim sa balat, tattoo tattoo ang kaso …nagising na ako tapos na ang pahinga mula sa trangkaso lagok ng tubig, isang baso banatin ang buto , kalas ulo tumatanda na nga talaga tayo… Doktor Karayom Russel Trinidad is a Filipino Artist that dove into the local art scene initially as a graffiti artist painting murals on abandoned buildings. Trinidad Graduated with a degree in Fine Arts at the Technological University of the Philippines, he masked behind his street name “Doktor Karayom” to avoid vandalism charges at the time he did only graffiti work. In this show, Trinidad directs his works toward the release in the reality of an individual due to the stressors and anxious events surrounding them, this is about regaining sanity and rest. Without hesitation, Trinidad focuses on what he decides to create, he uses art as his expression to liberate his deep thoughts. As his art changes on a constant, he finds solace in the fact that his works are apart from each other, where emotions are observed in each piece he lets out. Different concepts and creative thinking always have to be exerted to produce most of his output. Trinidad continued his street art while holding solo exhibitions and fulfilling commissions for his red paintings and sculptures. Doktor Karayom started to garner appreciation, receiving mainstream media coverage for his street art. He found success in art competitions, first winning a t-shirt design contest for a local fashion brand, and later the Ateneo Art Award in 2017 then the Thirteen Artist Award in 2018.

Tight Hold | October 4 - November 1, 2025 Tight Hold iSko Andrade & RC Caringal October 4 - November 1, 2025 1/4 View Catalogue Video Press Release Tight Hold brings together, for the first time, the artistic visions of iSko Andrade and RC Caringal in a two-person exhibition that reflects on the many bonds that shape our lives: within families, relationships, and communities. The title, departing from the familiar phrase “hold tight,” suggests that the connection already exists, sure and unshakable, and what remains is to recognize and confront its presence. Though united by theme, the artists move in different directions. Caringal turns her gaze to the human body, isolating the hands and their gestures. In her works, hands become a language in themselves: reaching out to save, grasping to secure, binding to keep close, or embracing in tenderness. Rendered with dense chiaroscuro and a photographic clarity, her canvases seem caught in a sudden flash of light, the moment suspended, the gesture preserved. Andrade, on the other hand, works through metaphoric fabrics that wrap and conceal, bound by ropes that suggest the fragile and complex nature of attachment. The ropes protect what lies within, knotting connections into place, but also carry the possibility of fraying, loosening, or entangling. His textured surfaces speak of what is kept hidden and the delicate tension that holds relationships together. In their collaborative piece “Unyielding Gaze,” these two approaches converge. Andrade’s luminous red fabric finds counterpoint in Caringal’s intimate handling of the body with the partial reveal of an eye, brow, and strands of hair. The work hovers between concealment and revelation, raising the question of how much of ourselves can be known, or whether recognition is always mediated through the gaze of another. Taken together, Tight Hold is not simply a meeting of two artists but a weaving of visions. It considers what steadies us against the forces that would tear us apart, and how intimacy—whether through touch or through the act of looking—secures our place in the world. -Carlomar Arcangel Daoana iSko Andrade & RC Caringal iSko Andrade is a Filipino visual artist specializing in hyper realistic painting, particularly of fabrics, lace, and everyday objects. A graduate of Fine Arts Major in Visual Communication from Bulacan State University (2017), he uses his art to evoke nostalgia and intimate memories, often through personal motifs like lace, garments, and domestic items. Andrade has won prestigious prizes such as the Grand Prize in the 47th Shell Art Competition (2014) and in the Philippine National Oil Company Competition (2015). His exhibitions combine technical precision with emotional depth, exploring family, memory, and the fabric of personal identity. RC Caringal is a contemporary Filipino painter known for exploring human emotion, perception, and vulnerability through figurative art. In her exhibitions, she used expressive large-scale canvases and textured, raw surfaces to expose how we hide, distort, or magnify our true selves in a social-media age. Her works interrogate personal and collective truths—inviting viewers to confront discomfort and connect more authentically with their own inner struggles.

Static & Silent Jaime Pacena II May 4 - June 1, 2024 Add a Title Describe your image Add a Title Describe your image Add a Title Describe your image Add a Title Describe your image 1/12 The exhibition "Static and Silent" presents the latest series by artist Jaime Pacena II, an exploration of stillness and observation in monochromatic form. "Static" represents a pause, a temporary cessation amid life's constant motion. In contrast, "Silent" prompts reflection on the complexities of human cognition and interpretation amidst the backdrop of daily life. Through this quiet dialogue, Pacena navigates emotions and perceptions, encapsulating aspects of human consciousness. In a world characterized by noise and chaos, "Static and Silent" offers a sanctuary—a place where time momentary pauses, and the soul finds solace in the rhythms of creative exploration. 1/1

Where the Land Becomes Stills | January 10, 2026 - February 7, 2026 Where the Land Becomes Stills Jep Dizon January 10, 2026 - February 7, 2026 1/10 View Catalogue Video Press Release 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. -Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

SKETCH MARKS Lorina Tayag Capitulo, Soler, Jonathan Joven, Epjey Pacheco, Ronson Culibrina, John Marin, Elmer Borlongan, Jill Arteche, Odang, Chad Montero, Pinggot Zulueta, Darel Javier, Charlie Co, Daniel Palma Tayona, Peque Gallaga, Cj Tañedo, Ben Albino, Rene Cuvos 14 November 2020 Sketch Marks Curated by Elmer Borlongan Drawing out the Line’s Possibilities Making a line on a surface may be the oldest form of art—and the earliest mode of communication. For our forebears, to extend this line (to draw it out) meant that they could replicate, transmit, and preserve a world, as conveyed by the Upper-Paleolithic cave drawings that still have the ability to mesmerize with how lucid and radiant they represent the animal kingdom. Drawing, in its direct application of marks of a usually monochromatic pigment, continues to enthrall for its immediate translation of the artist’s ideas onto any ground they so choose—a continuity of a long, unbroken tradition which began when an early man scratched a piece of ochre onto a cave wall. In Sketch Marks, a group show curated by Elmer Borlongan, drawing takes on a central focus as still one of the most relevant forms of art-making. Though he has established himself as a painter (and one of the most accomplished there is), Borlongan acknowledges the foundational role of drawing not merely as a preparatory work for painting (from the initial sketches to the grids on canvas) but as a way of imagining the world with its unique vocabulary of densities, shadings, tonalities, hatchings, and rounding of forms in space. Taking part in the show are Ben Albino, Chad Montero, Charlie Co, CJ Tañedo, Daniel Palma Tayona, Darel Javier, Borlongan, Epjey Pacheco, Odang, Jill Arteche, John Marin, Jonathan Joven, Lorina Tayag Capitulo, Peque Gallaga, Pinggot Zulueta, Rene Cuvos, Ronson Culubrina, and Soler. Tayona and Gallaga are participating posthumously. A cursory look at the names instantly reveals a group of artists known for a wide variety of material, stylistic, and thematic preoccupations and yet all of them convinced in the distilling capacity of drawing to reveal the essences of things through the quickened action of the wrist—from the silhouette of the female form to the abstract contemplations of geometry. As a tangential extension of the show, “Take a Line for a Walk,” which Borlongan curated at the UP Vargas Museum three years ago, drawing is presented as both the journey and destination to the imaginative aim of the artist: a complete and self-sustaining work. It seeks to present the ways in which drawing could be executed in contemporary times: from its enduring role of capturing a slice of objective reality, to notating thoughts and ideas, to prompting experimental approaches in the use of material beyond the conventional graphite, ink, and paper. Sketch Marks orients the attention of the viewer toward the ambition of drawing in a grand scale: not merely as finger exercise but as the gestural record of a world descriptive of both inner visions and external phenomena, fluent in winding lineation or hectic layering, at peace with the white space or in direct subversion of it. The participating artists did not only take the line for a walk: they spin it, they dance with it, and they run away with it as far as the mark could be stretched toward infinity. -Carlomar Arcangel Daoana VIEW THE EXHIBITION CATALOG

BOOK LAUNCH AN ORDINARY MAN, AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE BOOK LAUNCH MAY 2019

AN EXTRAORDINARY EYE FOR THE ORDINARY ELMER BORLONGAN METROPOLITAN MUSEUM JANUARY 2018