Gajah Gallery Manila & Leslie de Chavez
Gajah Gallery Manila & Leslie de Chavez
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
Introduction
Tonight’s opening of Leslie de Chavez at Gajah Gallery stages a rigorous, ritualized interrogation of land, memory, and spectacle. The exhibition, presented under the title A Kiss on the Ground (Halik sa Lupa), marries folkloric materiality with institutional critique and rewards historically informed looking. It asks viewers to confront how vernacular ritual—fiestas, Holy Week observances, Higantes pageantry—functions as both communal celebration and a repository of contested histories: colonial extraction, labor, and ecological dispossession. This essay collates the initial review into a sustained, academic reading of the show, situating de Chavez’s practice within broader curatorial and regional debates and offering concrete strategies for critical viewing.
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Context and Practice
Leslie de Chavez’s practice operates at the intersection of vernacular ritual, archival retrieval, and sculptural mise-en-scène. Drawing on the Pahiyas harvest festival, Higantes parades, and Holy Week rites from his native Quezon province, de Chavez constructs a visual language that is simultaneously celebratory and forensic. His materials—found objects, textiles, metallic finishes, collage, and painted surfaces—are not decorative afterthoughts but evidentiary traces. They function as indices of circulation: what is worn in procession, what is left in the field, what is repurposed into domestic or devotional objects. In this sense, spectacle becomes a method of inquiry rather than mere ornament.
Key features of de Chavez’s practice include:
- Material palimpsest: layered surfaces where paint, fabric, and found ephemera meet, revealing histories of reuse and displacement.
- Ritual as archive: pageantry and procession are treated as living documents that encode labor relations, religious economies, and colonial legacies.
- Ambivalent aesthetics: sumptuous finishes and gilded surfaces that attract the eye while simultaneously complicating the ethical reading of the subject matter.
De Chavez’s work insists that beauty and critique are not mutually exclusive; rather, aesthetic allure can be a strategic device to draw attention to histories that institutions often marginalize.
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Exhibition Frame and Formal Strategies
Curated by Joyce Toh for Gajah Gallery, A Kiss on the Ground frames looking as a method of knowledge. The title gestures to reverence and resistance: to “kiss” the ground is to acknowledge both attachment and injury. The curatorial apparatus positions ritual paraphernalia as archival traces, casting de Chavez as witness and interlocutor to local histories that resonate transnationally.
The exhibition deploys a small set of formal strategies repeatedly and with variation. The following table summarizes the central strategies, their material means, and the intended viewer effect:
| Strategy | Materiality | Viewer effect |
|---|---:|---|
| Processional tableaux | Mixed media; found objects; textiles | Spectacle; communal recognition |
| Gilded sculptural altars | Metallic finishes; pedestals; textiles | Ambivalence: reverence vs. critique |
| Collage and archival painting | Layered pigment; printed ephemera | Cognitive dissonance; archival unease |
These strategies create a choreography of attention. Central, gilded objects function as altars or focal points—objects of reverence that also read as critiques of wealth and power. Peripheral works, often smaller and documentary in tone, carry the archival weight: collages that incorporate printed ephemera, labels that gesture toward provenance, and installations that foreground labored materials. The spatial arrangement thus mirrors social hierarchies, asking viewers to move from spectacle to testimony.
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Critical Reading and Evidence-Based Strategies
A rigorous reading of the exhibition requires attention to seams—literal and metaphorical—where materials meet and meanings shift. The following evidence-based strategies will help viewers extract the show’s political claims without being seduced solely by surface beauty.
1. Attend to material seams.
Where paint meets found object, ask: what was repurposed and why? A textile stitched into a sculptural reliquary may carry traces of domestic labor; a gilded surface may conceal a history of extraction. These seams are the primary loci where circulation and provenance become legible.
2. Read pageantry as palimpsest.
Festive forms often mask extraction. The Higantes figure or harvest motif is not simply folkloric nostalgia; it is a layered text that can reveal who benefits from the harvest, who performs the labor, and how colonial economies shaped ritual economies. Ask who is represented and who is absent.
3. Compare scale and placement.
Scale is rhetorical. Central, monumental objects demand reverence and attention; smaller, peripheral works often carry documentary or testimonial weight. The spatial hierarchy in the gallery is a clue to the artist’s argument: spectacle draws the eye, while documentary pieces supply the historical context.
4. Interrogate curatorial framing.
Curatorial notes and wall texts are part of the exhibition’s rhetoric. Where the curatorial apparatus foregrounds ritual as archive, assess whether it also provides provenance, worker testimony, or community voices. The presence or absence of these elements affects the political legibility of the work.
5. Seek relational readings.
Read works in relation to one another rather than in isolation. A gilded bull or altar gains meaning when juxtaposed with a field of small white sculptural objects or a textile bearing text about burial and memory. These juxtapositions create dialectical tensions between spectacle and testimony.
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Merits, Tensions, and Broader Relevance
Merits. De Chavez’s practice excels at translating vernacular ritual into a critical visual lexicon. The works are materially sumptuous yet conceptually sharp, forcing viewers to reconcile aesthetic pleasure with histories of extraction and devotion. The exhibition’s dramaturgy—central altars, peripheral documentary works—creates a choreography of attention that mirrors social hierarchies and invites ethical looking.
Tensions. The show occasionally flirts with the ornamentalization of trauma. Gilded surfaces and theatrical staging risk neutralizing the testimonies embedded in the materials. Without a more explicit archival apparatus—worker narratives, provenance notes, or community voices—the political claim can be partially occluded by spectacle. This tension is not necessarily a failure; it is a productive friction that asks whether beauty can function as critique or whether it domesticates the histories it invokes.
Broader relevance. Presented in Singapore amid renewed regional debates about cultural heritage, land rights, and postcolonial memory, the exhibition resonates with ongoing conversations about decolonizing museum practices and the ethics of display. De Chavez’s turn to local ritual as a critical resource aligns with a broader Southeast Asian tendency to rework vernacular forms into contemporary critique. The show thus speaks to both Philippine audiences and transnational viewers interested in how local forms can illuminate global structures of extraction and memory.
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Conclusion and Recommendation
Verdict. A Kiss on the Ground is a compelling, erudite intervention into contemporary Philippine visuality—ambitious in scope, materially persuasive, and provocatively ambivalent. It stages necessary frictions between spectacle and testimony and demands sustained, historically literate looking. The exhibition offers a model for how contemporary art can make vernacular ritual legible as political archive while reminding curators and institutions to pair aesthetic strategies with documentary care.
Recommendations for curators and viewers. Curators should consider augmenting the exhibition with more explicit archival materials—provenance notes, worker testimonies, and community narratives—to deepen the political claim. Viewers should practice the evidence-based reading strategies outlined above, moving beyond surface allure to interrogate the histories embedded in materials and forms.
If further expansion is desired, a catalogue essay could provide close readings of three specific works, situate de Chavez within a lineage of Philippine artists who engage ritual and archive, and map the exhibition onto contemporary debates about land, labor, and memory in Southeast Asia.
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As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.
Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders
His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.
Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.
Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.
Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan’s art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.
Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational.
I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog as repositories and drafts.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ started Independent Curatorial Manila™ as a nonprofit philantrophy while working for institutions simultaneosly early on.
The Independent Curatorial Manila™ or ICM™ is a curatorial services and guide for emerging artists in the Philippines. It is an independent/ voluntary services entity and aims to remains so. Selection is through proposal and a prerogative temporarily. Contact above for inquiries.
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