Maia Cruz Palileo

In the Filipino language, the word kwento refers to “story” or “telling a story.” Maia Cruz Palileo uses their canvases to tell the stories of their personal relationship with the Philippines, whether by painting close relatives or by reworking the characters of the photographs collected during archival research.

We met Pailileo in their Brooklyn studio, where they were working on new bodies of work. “This residency came at the right time,” tells Palileo, “the windows create an amazing light, and the space is giving me a chance to work on a larger scale.” The studio is indeed surrounded by grandiose-scale paintings, in which the figures are surrounded by intricate configurations recalling the natural environments of the Philippines. The composition is dense, but looser than their previous works. It is an evolution that mirrors Palileo’s current approach to painting, born out of a progression in how the artist perceives their own relationship with the roots of their individual heritage and collective past.

“In the beginning, I was working with a feeling of vengeance, you could see that in the expressions of my characters, I felt like I needed to take care of them. But now there’s an evolution. My work is less tied to trying to change the narrative. I rather use the material I have to find different meanings to rework linearity in favor of complexity. I wonder what their message would be to us?”

This newfound energy is rendered on the canvas with a more expansive and gestural painting: if before brushstrokes were dictated by anger, generating a tightness in the painting themselves, now the artist has managed to let go, moving towards expansive brushwork, which is also looser, and more cohesive. “There is also a lot of touching,” adds Palileo, “it represents a physical connection with the canvas sustained over time.”

Another important element of Palileo’s practice is the use of collage, a technique through which the artist is able to manipulate the collected archival pictures in new compositions, freeing them from a gaze that froze them in colonial narratives. This practice is deeply informed by what Eve Tuck refers to as shifting from damage-centered research to a desire-based one. In Palileo’s composition, there is, of course, an account of a complicated past related to empire, but also the generative process of imagining new stories, possibilities, and hope.

“I was drawn to the people in the pictures and felt the impulse to remove them from this historical framework. I drew figures, plants, and other elements from the archive. Then, I cut out each drawing, creating a new library of cutouts: people, animals, foliage, moons, and mountains. The pieces were then placed in various arrangements and recorded via graphite rubbings. This process allowed for the cutouts to be combined into potentially infinite visual narratives and led to the generation of full-color oil paintings.”

<Read the full essay from Issue Six>