Visit Now: Silverlens’ First Art Exhibitions from Jan 9 – Feb 5
Silverlens proudly kicks off its 2025 Manila exhibitions with Points and Endings, Sanctuary, and Entangled Pairs from January 9 – February 5, 2025.
Points and Endings, Keka Enriquez’s much-awaited solo exhibition in Manila since 2008 highlights her artistic journey from the Metro in the ’80s to her current base in San Francisco. Her dynamic works explore the theme of the house as both a familiar space and an aspirational ideal that blend domestic interiors with abstract scenes that reveal surprising figurative elements—a man’s face, a child, or a dog—hidden amidst th compositions.
Keka Enriquez’s Points and Endings / IMAGES from Silverlens
Enriquez’s paintings are a rich interplay of bold colors, restless brushwork, and dense layering that transforms the house into a space of imagination and critique. Her works evoke the idea of a “dream house,” often styled to reflect aspirations inspired by media or personal longing. Yet, her pieces also invite a deeper exploration, with quiet moments and intricate details that suggest still life within a bustling domestic scene. Enriquez masterfully blurs the lines between abstraction and representation, creating works that challenge the viewer’s expectations and reveal the complexities of home, memory, and history.
Through this exhibition, Enriquez’s artistry is further contextualized within broader conversations about painting as a medium, her position as a woman artist, and her identity as a migrant. Her works connect expressionism and conceptualism, bridging local and global histories of art, while also showing her lived experience across cultures that dare to engage the audience with the intersecting narratives of identity, place, and creativity that define her body of work today.
Meanwhile, Yvonne Quisumbing’s solo exhibition Sanctuary draws inspiration from her time in Barangay Lugo, a rural farmland in northern Cebu that she has called home for 15 years. It has become her sanctuary—a place where she paints in a cottage studio, shares meals with the local community, and witnesses the simple joys of rural life. However, Lugo’s sugarcane farming, a livelihood for generations, faces precarious challenges with the closure of nearby sugar mills, forcing farmers into dangerous and costly alternatives. This stark contrast between the beauty of the land and the fragility of its economy drives the themes of her exhibition.
Yvonne Quisumbing’s Sanctuary / IMAGES from Silverlens
This exhibit builds upon Quisumbing’s earlier Apothecary series, focusing on Philippine medicinal plants that thrive in Lugo. These plants has been and still being used by farmers to heal wounds and illnesses in the absence of accessible healthcare that symbolize both the resilience of the community and the land’s enduring vitality. In her intricate works, Quisumbing layers these plants over subtle depictions of human forms—hands and arms that evoke the often-overlooked care and labor of farmers. The fragility of the land is further illustrated with the snapdragon, whose delicate petals dry into skull-like shapes, serving as a poignant memento mori for the dwindling sugarcane industry. Contrasting this is the tikarol, a bird with vivid blue wings, symbolizing hope and perseverance amidst adversity.
Through sculptural paintings resembling creased sheets of paper, Quisumbing channels her anxieties and prayers for Lugo. These textured surfaces, echoing her personal practice of folding written petitions during moments of deep reflection, embody her hopes for the land to continue providing and sheltering its people. While deeply personal, Sanctuary extends beyond Lugo, shedding light on the shared struggles of farmers across the Philippines, grappling with rising costs and climate change. By weaving personal memory with universal themes, Quisumbing offers a heartfelt yet respectful glimpse into the fragility and resilience of a community intertwined with its land.
Running alongside Points and Endings and Sanctuary, Renato Orara’s Entangled Pairs is a cross-continental exhibition that bridges galleries in Manila and New York.
Renato Orara’s Entangled Pairs / IMAGES from Silverlens
Entangled Pairs showcases 100 intricately detailed ballpoint pen drawings of everyday objects, such as a glove and a plastic water bottle, a teapot and a hammer, and a tomato and a butternut squash. These works are paired and split, with counterparts displayed across continents. This format shows the concept of quantum entanglement—a phenomenon where intertwined particles remain energetically connected despite spatial or temporal separation, likened to “the closest thing to magic that can happen in physics.”
By splitting these pairs across Silverlens’ Manila and New York galleries, Orara’s drawings realize their full conceptual potential, transforming the galleries themselves into entangled spaces. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate dualistic perceptions of self, relationships, and the fabric of reality. Through the lens of quantum entanglement, Entangled Pairs highlights the invisible threads that bind us across distances, urging audiences to explore the intangible yet powerful connections that shape our world.
You may visit Silverlens Manila at 2263 Chino Roces Ave, Ave, Makati, Tuesdays to Saturdays from 9 p.m. – 6 p.m. For inquiries, you may contact them on their official website, Facebook, or Instagram.
