Nomads is a meditation on the universal human act of migration. Each painting explores the themes of leaving home, the distances we cover, and the threads of relationships that we weave in our wake. The process of coming, going, assimilating, and excising is the catalyst for our evolution—a Sisyphean endeavour to attain a finished state. 

The paintings often begin unfurled on floors, pavement, soil, shores, or any flat surface where the canvas can be altered by the environment. They accumulate dripped paint and other media; stains from salt water, sand, dirt, dust; or distress and weathering from wind, rain, and humidity. When the surface has dried, I tear the canvas into smaller pieces and mount the shreds on an upright stretched canvas. I refer to a library of photographs of family, friends, sometimes strangers I have taken throughout the years, to find a face that matches the textures on the surface. With acrylics, I would render each portrait as if they are a continuation of the patterns.

Nomads, the exhibit, is a continuation of my existing practice of exploring damage-based modes of production in portraiture. In this series, the subjects are based on my own face; Dexter, a close friend and fellow artist; Linda, a cook who works in my wife’s hometown province of Culasi; and Barbie, my wife. The titles are coordinates that point to a place that each subject considers home. Apart from my own, these faces are non-blood relationships starting with the close affinity I have with my wife, my friendship with Dexter, and an employee of Barbie’s family. They are also representatives of typical Filipino ethnic diversity.

The portraits are accompanied by a quadriptych piece entitled “Vantage Point,” made of four 12 x 12-inch paintings made out of extra fragments. Each piece presents a recapitulation of past exhibits held in the Philippines and different countries for the last four years: a series made with sand from my wife’s seaside hometown; paintings made on the rooftop of my parents’ house in Marikina during a tropical storm; shreds from an exhibit in Osaka, Japan; and a series from a New York exhibition. They are all mounted on a large tarpaulin I used to cover the floor of the studio during my artist residency in Japan. These paintings represent where my feet have tread repeatedly, and ruminate on the traces we leave behind, and the debris we acquire. 

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edited by Kuki Ulpindo

additional pics by Cyril Sumook