Silverlens Manila presents The Edge Where the Shadow Softens a duo exhibition mixing large paintings and sculptures by Ayka Go and Paolo Icasas. This is the first time they are exhibiting together with each showing new work.

The two connect through their shared expression of the abstract with Ayka finding freedom in order and Paolo rooting the same freedom in spontaneity. Ayka begins each work through minutely arranged studies of paper collages. Each iteration is recorded and numbered until the final compositional form is achieved which she rarely deviates from. She then paints from it as if it were still life. On the other hand, Paolo starts his paintings with a sketch as a take-off point then proceeds to paint from intuition and experience unrestrained. The result is a work that is unexpected and thickly layered because he does not stop until the eventual painting is revealed.

Both artists find the source for their forms in their environment with Paolo citing landscapes taken from home and memory as part of the images he destroys on canvas. Ayka finds the materials for her collages from refuse around her studio, a practice prompted by the pandemic when she was made to slow down and reflect. Ayka and Paolo talk about trying to capture a sense of time, of temporal existence in the way they paint. But in their hands, whatever that moment was ceases to matter but it is their revision of the moment that matters more.

In Ayka’s large monochromatic paintings of bold color, discarded and cut-out paper takes on the quality of geography as if it were monolithic and immovable with the shadows and sharp crevices of a canyon eroded by the years. The same thread of physicality carries over in her sculptures which seem to be composed of irregular shaped layers deformed, bent, and crumpled together on a mound. Paolo’s massive dark paintings offer a counter to the control with chaos in its emphasis on mark-making that splatters, slices, and swirls on the surface. He likes to use atypical tools when painting like a wider palette knife used for building houses. There are glimpses of yellow and white peeking out of the canvas and the coatings as if to hint at something solid amid the fluidity.

Ayka and Paolo trace their early careers in referential art before exploring their language for the abstract. At the path of their artistic journeys is a shared desire to understand the inner coherence which drives a painting to its completeness and convinces the viewer there was no other way to do it.

– Joyce Roque

Ayka Go (b. 1993, Philippines) is a painter whose practice explores her steadfast relationship with the material of paper and its myriad of potential forms from sheets, tears, to folds. Go reinterprets her personal histories, long-forgotten memories and secret inscriptions of childhood diaries, onto her delicate and origami-like trompe l'oeil paintings.

Paolo Icasas (b. 1981, Philippines) graduated in 2003 from the University of Sto. Tomas with a Fine Arts degree, majoring in Advertising. Often painting landscapes inspired by the locales where he lives and works, Icasas steers away from traditional rural landscapes, usually featuring Filipino peasant life with accompanying imagery, but keeps similar sentiments. His paintings are inspired by work—often manual labor—by the  daily struggles of the common man, by the uncertainties that always go with living, and by man’s universal longing for rest.

We were first introduced to Icasas’ darkly lit landscapes in Life Jacket Under Your Seat (2016), an exhibition with Surrounded By Water in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, which was re-exhibited in Blanc Gallery shortly after. The following year, he had a significant breakthrough with his one-man exhibition, The Ordinary Man, at Pasilyo Vicente Manansala in the Cultural Center of The Philippines Main Theatre.

His most recent one-man exhibition, Current Landscape, took place in 2021 at Blanc Gallery in Quezon City. He held a solo presentation titled Excerpts From A Monotony Journal in Silverlens’ Online Viewing Room in 2022.