“We are born knowing,” Chati Coronel writes in her artist statement for Notes for Exaltation, her ninth solo exhibition with Silverlens.

Coronel is known for her multi-layered paintings created through a process she refers to as Figurative Spatialism. Here, she paints layers of abstract movement in raw strokes and contains them in a color space that forms a human figure’s silhouette. Her work is informed by a wide range of influences, including Rudolf Steiner, Louis Kahn, poetry, fables, and Tibetan Buddhist thought.

In Notes for Exaltation, Chati Coronel presents six large paintings that continue her search for intrinsic knowledge and power, drawing inspiration from figures in Tarot and ancient Gnostic verses. Framed by her ongoing interest in what she refers to as Human Power—an innate intelligence displaced by systems of efficiency and control—the exhibition invites viewers to turn inward and reconnect with the self.

Four of the works in the exhibition forgoes the human figure, urging the viewer to see themselves within the worlds depicted in the works. Each work corresponds to one of the four instruments of the Magus (Magician) in tarot, the first Major Arcana card in traditional tarot decks, reimagined as anatomical blueprints. Coronel’s practice is rooted in the idea that the body is not merely a vessel but a living instrument: one that moves, remembers, and knows from within. She proposes an inner development, emerging through four symbols: the wand (nervous system), the sword (spine), the grail (heart), and the pentacle (mind).

The exhibition’s eponymous work, Notes on Exaltation is the wand, enabling us to feel the world. It channels the nervous system as a conduit for reception, bursting through the layers of consciousness until it overflows like a fountain with water.

Arcturus, the sword, is tied to the spine, a force of discernment that cuts through conditioned habits. With a sharp line cutting through the middle of the painting, it clears the path forward.

Raising the Cup embodies the grail, resonating with the heart, reminding us that we must be full to truly give. A veil of color conceals sections of the painting, revealing hands in motions of holding, cumulating into a fountain of water, lifting the veil as it flows down.

Ignis stands as the pentacle, linked to the mind, a radiance bursting almost explosively, echoing the arrival of spirit into matter and the sharpening of thought into clarity.

Two other paintings underscore the human as simultaneously one whole and a fragment of something bigger. Thunder: Perfect Mind takes inspiration from the Gnostic texts, particularly the poetic voice of The Thunder, Perfect Mind, which speaks in contradictions: divine and fallen, known and hidden. Holding this contradiction without trying to resolve it, the work reflects the human condition as both fractured and complete. Light Fountain offers a vision of ascent. Rising above is a human figure, an overflowing cup that can give freely. Here, the human is not just a vessel, but a fountain.

Playing with concepts of concealing and revealing, Coronel’s work engages the ambiguity of the crossroads, a duality that exists despite their apparent contradiction. Coronel’s cosmology considers different systems of the body as active agents that have long been perceived as little more than flesh and blood. They contain an original spark, the thread that ties the systems of the body to the cosmos. Coronel’s works descend into stillness, searching the psyche, before bringing to light the spirit within. 

Disguised as paintings, the six works in Notes for Exaltation are coded messages, sigils, ritual objects designed to pull at each viewer’s invisible strings. Through the exhibition, Coronel seeks to awaken what lies dormant in each viewer, in the hope that they remember.

—Angel Stinson

Chati Coronel (b. 1970, Manila; lives and works in Toronto) is a painter whose three-decade practice probes the liminal territory between body and cosmos through a method she calls Figurative Spatialism. Layering atmospheric fields of colour within human silhouettes, Coronel treats the figure as a vessel through which metaphysical forces materialise.

Her work has been the subject of sixteen solo exhibitions and has appeared at Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze Seoul, and The Armory Show, New York. Coronel’s paintings are held in private and corporate collections across Asia and North America. Guided by cosmological inquiry, she wields painting to recast primal myth as a blueprint for possible futures.