Guenivere Decena: Patihulog sa Ritmo ng Paubaya

(Falling Into the Rhythm of Release)

Orange Project, Booth 39, 9F

Corporate Center One, Circuit Makati

6 to 8 February 2026

An illusion of a delicate spinal line often appears, dividing what seem to be mirrored forms that swirl endlessly around it, always in motion, unwilling to come to rest. This seeming fragility, paired with a commanding centrality and inhabited by uncanny images symbolizing faith, resilience, and community, is what most often hovers across the picture planes of artist Guenivere Decena.

Patihulog sa Ritmo ng Paubaya (Falling Into the Rhythm of Release) is at once a portrait, a landscape, and a life held in stillness. As it resists the recurring patterns of old wounds and recent scars, the works in the exhibition oscillate between the madness of holding on and the profound beauty of letting go.

In her graphite works, An Apple, A Cigarette, a Book, a Day and Realities, Decena turns toward the restorative, grounding patterns drawn from memory that generate questions as forms that function as quiet refusals, shaped by the duality of love and fidelity. Within this tension, an enduring spirituality emerges, continuing to shape her faith in a light that rises from within, evident in Waves and Inner Sun, while a faith attuned to uncertainty and ambivalence finds abstraction in Intuition.

A multidisciplinary artist, Decena’s practice moves between poetry and science, tracing the muted logic of interconnection. She approaches art-making like breathing, both catharsis and contemplation, a way of turning inward while reflecting on being and becoming. Her works linger in the fragile space where vulnerability meets resilience, where the soul and body emerge as shifting, contested terrains.

In her series of monochromatic diptychs, Burn Bright and Baylo Banga, Decena intimates both the frail and the unbreakable within the depths of interior being. The figures emerge as desolated bodies suspended in liminal spaces, becoming vessels for society’s judgments. Even as attention is drawn toward the symbols attached to each character, the figures remain acutely conscious, their postures marked by a quiet abashment. This heightened awareness is further intensified by the synthetic space of the arch-shaped window framing, which starkly encloses the pain imposed by society’s conventional views of womanhood. 

While the diptychs present nakedness as a state of ambivalence, set against disdainful walls and piercing shadows, the mixed media work On the Indolence of Mothers depicts the exposed body as a shield. Curled almost into a fetal position, the tiny figures squeezed inside an empty chemotherapy tablet container evoke the irony of needing to heal in order to live, and to live in order to heal.  

By contrast, the series of works on paper created using expired cosmetic products donated by women from Negros acknowledges themes of isolation and emptiness. The figures are frozen mid-action, suspended in a moment of incompleteness. They seem either to be poised in restrained dialogue or struggling to separate themselves from their unruly shadows, which linger as resonant echoes of former selves.

Amplified by her signature surrealist vision, at once arresting and deeply intimate, Radical Gratitude resists rigid symmetry, leaning instead into urgency and the flowing painful tenderness of time and space as they unfold. This monumental work listens closely to the act of listening itself, attending with generosity to life’s voiceless whispers of ambivalence and doubt. Cards spiral around figures rendered in vulnerability, while a house of cards built from the innocence of the juvenile, rises as a central spine, continually transforming into wings, knives, walls, and shields. Above them, the unmistakable hands of a higher being impose themselves, holding the space and orchestrating its tensions, undercutting the protagonists’ gestures of listening, rest, and surrender, and exposing the tenuous illusion of agency within the act of attention itself.

Decena’s visuality reveals that mirrors are never faithful, literally and figuratively. What appears within them are truths fractured and held in suspension by the workings of our own imagination, an elusive presence adrift in an oblique realm, shaped and distorted by the gentle pull of daydreams and the darker shadows of nightmares.

A former Fine Arts lecturer at La Consolacion College, Bacolod City, and a mother of three, Decena now works full-time as an artist engaged in community-based projects in Negros Occidental. She has exhibited widely across the Philippines, Germany, Switzerland, and Malaysia, including Take Cover (2018) and Fragile (2014).

Words by Leslie de Chavez