Artists Binong Javier, Mikel Parial, and Gio Lebajo depict life, balance, and connection in their solo exhibits this month

Upcoming: ‘Drop of Life’

Venue: Galerie Roberto, Muntinlupa City

Galerie Roberto presents “Drop of Life,” a solo show by artist Binong Javier that demonstrates his mastery over pointillist abstract expressionism. The expansive canvases come to life with meticulous and deliberate strokes of colors. Each is made of a singular drop that adds up to more than the literal sum of its parts.

The artist draws attention to the fundamental mark that a brush leaves behind and the physical qualities of paint, and its three-dimensional possibilities. On Javier’s canvases, the accrual of these individual strokes unfolds into encompassing images: majestic vistas and brilliant sceneries. Richly textured, the crevasses and peaks of these paintings take on a sculptural quality, shifting and shaping with angles of light and sight. 

Several of these works take after nature, and how gravity shapes vivid cascades out of physical objects. The images seemingly capture these drips in the midst of falling, at particular instances where they form a cohesive harmony. In other works, the strokes converge or explode from a singular point, forming vertiginous chasms and dizzying heights. 

“Drop of Life” will be available for viewing on March 20, 2021.

Ongoing: ‘The Act of Balance’

Venue: Galerie Joaquin Podium, Ortigas Center, Mandaluyong City

Text by Grace Engracia

Mikel Parial’s “The Act of Balance” explores the effects of life choices on memory, identity, and the subconscious. The temporal nature of life is reiterated through the balancing act of one shape encountering another. Whether supported or supporting, the characters in the paintings evolve as enduring elements in a story, often defying gravity, showing both strength and vulnerability. While highly polished, subtle, often faint, Parial’s visual narrative references the passing of time, drawing on his own experiences, personal scars, stories, and forgotten memories.

Parial thinks of his oeuvre as a visual transposition of pictures, which are formed in the mind successively while experiencing, sensing, and encountering one’s reality. His art invites his audience to contemplate his story as they highlight his own precarious balancing of life.

“The Act of Balance” by Mikel Parial is up for viewing until March 25, 2021. 

Ongoing: ‘Symmetry’

Venue: Pintô Art Museum, Antipolo City

“Symmetry” is Gio Lebajo’s first solo exhibition featuring 11 paintings characterized by a combination of lines and grids that symbolizes stability and structure against the soft fluidity of forms of nature.

In everyday language, it refers to a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance. It depicts a more precise definition and is usually used to refer to an object that is invariant under some transformation, reflection, rotation, tessellation, and scaling.

Lebajo is a graduate of Interior Design at La Salle Saint Benilde. He has been exposed to arts since his younger years, often observing and accompanying his father, and managing the latter’s exhibitions. Indeed, creativity never runs out in the Lebajo bloodline.

The show runs until April 4, 2021.