Silverlens presents Carlos Villa: Lying + Flying.
Lying + Flying is anchored by a group of 1980s-era body prints on large, unstretched canvases, paintings that make the artist’s body both subject and instrument. Villa inked his naked form and pressed it onto fabric: face, hands, limbs, torsos. The gesture is direct, even blunt. A brown body marks space, refusing erasure. Years after his death, Villa still stands in the room.
‘Kite God Coat,’ 1979, rooster and pheasant tail feather, paper pulp, 87.0h x 109.0w in
But Villa’s crisp body prints were just one layer of his lived-in approach. He played from both hands, drawing fluidly and nonhierarchically across ethnographies and the avant-garde. He assembled materials, philosophies, and relationships into a collage that reflected his own life of plurality. He held ritual, humor, art, politics, and material culture together like an unruly household that somehow still worked.
‘Untitled (face print drawing),’ c. 1980s, ink and pencil on paper, 40.5 x 28.36 x 1.66 in (framed)
The pieces in Lying + Flying, like the artist’s larger practice, is masquerade as messy, but this is only a cartomancer’s bluff. Wait a moment and an architecture emerges, a cunning grid that ripples rather than locks into place. Villa understood composition as an organism that is both organic and organized. His art asks where mark-making slips into performance slips into ritual, and why these semantic boundaries, and boundaries themselves, even matter at all. – (Katey Acquaro)
Detail from work by Leonardo Aguinaldo
Detail from work by John Frank Sabado
Silverlens is also presenting Raised by Mountains, a two-man exhibition by Leonardo Aguinaldo and John Frank Sabado.
Being raised in the mountains means always seeing the world from an altitude. The expansive becomes intuitive, and the interconnected is reliable. This is examined in John Frank Sabado’s portraits of people who have shaped his sense of communality from childhood. In Leonardo Aguinaldo’s works, the figures see themselves as seeing the world change and how they wish to be seen in it.
Both artists situate their practice around cultural migrations within the Cordillera Region and its neighbors. The region has changed borders more recently over time, under different political shades and agendas. The present borders were formed by a struggle for autonomy that was partly conceived right after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. This region of Indigenous Peoples who have maintained resistance and distinctive communities since pre-colonial times is where both artists’ families have migrated to and integrated their lives. Aguinaldo was born and raised in Baguio City, and Sabado in the mining town of Lepanto in Mankayan, Benguet.
Each artist presents works that are informed by local indigenous relationalities profoundly scrutinized in the mid-1980s by the Baguio Arts Guild. Sabado and Aguinaldo started as young members in the guild founded by artists like Santiago Bose, who espoused socially-engaged modalities in the guild festivals.
In the decades following, both artists have continued to engage local relationality, protest, belongingness, Baguio City’s pan-indigeneity, and their autobiographical placements in this history. They have consistently produced works that are unmistakably concerned with the visual culture of the region, and the futures that are formed by incessantly seeing more than the sum of parts. (Rocky Acofo Cajigan)
Both exhibitions open on Tuesday, 24 February 2026, with a reception from 5 to 8 pm, at the Silverlens Gallery Manila. Both will be on view from 24 February to 28 March, 2026.
Silverlens Gallery Manila is at 2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati City 1231, Philippines, and is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm. Call tel. nos. (+632) 8816-0044 and (+63917) 587-4011, or email infomnl@silverlensgalleries.com.
