Galeria Paloma offers a 'phygital' experience at Art Fair PH 2023

Galeria Paloma will be representing the following artists at the fair, selected for their contributions to the digital and new media landscapes both here and abroad: Skye Nicolas, Luis Buenaventura, Bjorn Calleja, Jopet Arias, The Alarcon Brothers, Carlos, Wyn-Lyn Tan, Raymond Lauchengco, AJ Dimarucot, Aswang, Sevi Agregado, Isaiah Cacnio, and Sheila Ledesma.

"The emergence of the metaverse has made axiomatic parallels to the physical world," says Delgado. "Art has become one of its layers, and we are proud to present a roster of the best artists who have embraced this multi-layered medium in all its complexity."

Know more about the featured artists here:

This post-conceptual artist has works that range from large-format paintings, films, photographs, public space interventions, sculptures, and digital artworks. For Art Fair Philippines, he is exhibiting his very first Walkman readymade paired with an NFT that features nostalgic songs from the '80s.

His digitally native works for Parallel brings to light the inability of artificial intelligence to draw/create hands compared to human artists. This running conversation in the art scene takes centre stage with Buenaventura's works, challenging the thought that AI could possibly replace today's leading artists.

Buenaventura is known as one of the artists of Curio Cards, recognised as a pioneer of NFT art on the Ethereum blockchain. The artist holds the record for the highest-selling digitally native NFT made by a Filipino artist.

Calleja is a painter and interdisciplinary artist who has received accolades locally and abroad, and more recently for his NFT projects exhibited in Art Basel Hong Kong and SEA Focus in Singapore. 

For Parallel, his largely recognisable, humanoid characters that figure heavily in his paintings and animated GIFs/NFTs are rendered as works of sculpture on a tiny scale, unidentifiable as beings except on the basis of their phenotypic sex, which belies their larger-than-life presence. The NFTs of these sculptures are GLB files, allowing for 3D viewing of the static object.

See also: Bjorn Calleja on Navigating the Future of Art

For this artist, the adoption of the metaverse is parallel to our ingrained human longing for something beyond our reality. Arias infuses his work with spiritual themes, interspersing realist painting with surrealist and fantasy images and layers them with his trademark augmented reality renderings that stand as artworks in themselves. Arias is considered one of the forerunners of Philippine crypto art. He founded CryptoArtPh, where he shepherds a community of artists with his knowledge and experience of the emerging space as a painter and multi-disciplinary visual artist.

Artists in their own right, Ejem, Aldrine, and Didier Alarcon are three of the four Alarcon brothers who have collaborated on artworks and most recently digital artworks that have given them recognition in the crypto art scene.

See also: The Alarcons: DNArt

Carlos' paintings for Parallel uses an augmented reality layer to showcase a timelapse, turning the paintings' skies from night to day, making light of parallel time. Works of sculpture by the artist delving into his signature theme of labour work's nobility will also be exhibited.

She is a Singaporean painter and artist whose work has been exhibited widely in New York, Norway, and Art Basel Hong Kong. Her paintings can be found in the permanent collection of the Singapore Art Museum. Her works are currently on exhibit at the Esplanade Tunnel in Singapore until May, launched at the Art SG last January. Her generative work is the result of using specially programmed artificial intelligence programmes to train a curated set of thousands of images of her work.

See also: Art SG: Collectors turned out in full force for the fair's VIP preview

Raymond Lauchengco has added functional art creator and digital artist to his already impressive resume as an award-winning theatre and film artist, photographer, and director. Parallel offers Lauchengco’s select collection of salvaged, found wood pieces turned into works of functional art layered with a digital artwork based on each work’s thematic narrative.

An artist, art designer, illustrator, and graphic designer, AJ Dimarucot has enjoyed an illustrious career creating campaigns for international brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, Marvel, Star Wars, Adidas, the NFL, MLB, and NBA. While the controversy surrounding AI is prevalent in recent discussions about art’s meaning, Dimarucot has embraced the technology, confidently creating artworks with a firm grip on his own natural talent as an artist.​

This is the anonymous illustrator and mastermind behind the Aswang Collection and Aswang Tribe, and whose works have garnered over 600 Ethereum (over 50 million pesos) in trading volume. For Parallel, Aswang will be exhibiting one of his 1/1 pieces, Nine Mananaggals, which continues to reflect the creatures' desire to use NFTs as a medium for sharing Filipino ancient, archetypal, pre-colonial stories.  Their mission is towards cultural preservation, one of blockchain technology’s best use cases, of Filipino heritage.

This wonder kid's colourful paintings of wildlife will be displayed at the Art Fair Philippines, employing augmented reality as an added layer to the works on canvas. He is considered the first Filipino child NFT artist, minting his first works while still in first grade. Digital versions of his paintings have been exhibited in Times Square (for NFT.NYC), Art Basel Miami, various galleries in the United States and Singapore, as well as publications like Vogue Singapore and The Straits Times.  

Cacnio is presenting Portals for this year's Art Fair Philippines, recognising how the metaverse has opened doorways into different realities. His work is an offshoot of his first collection, Fractals, which are his abstracted, colourised, and animated depictions of these never-ending mathematical patterns, scales, and spherical coordinates. A graduate of engineering, Cacnio also sees Portals as looking into his own creative process and how his creative and mathematical inclinations interact.

Her visual arts career has focused largely on surrealist collages using an unusual medium like old makeup. Surrealist and Dadaist techniques contribute to the composition of her artworks. Her contributions to Parallel, are a set of works that mark milestones in her journey in the NFT space.

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