David Kordansky Gallery, which has spaces in Los Angeles and New York, will now represent New York–based artist Maia Cruz Palileo. The gallery will feature Palileo, who will continue to be represented by Monique Meloche in Chicago, in its booth at Art Basel Hong Kong later this month and will mount a solo show for the artist in early 2025.
Palileo is best-known for paintings that mix lush colors with electric ones, creating compositions that are layered and complex, often exploring the US-born artist’s own relationship to the Philippines and uncovering the histories of their family there.
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“I have a very deep curiosity about my family because I was born here [in the US] and they came from the Philippines,” Palileo told ARTnews in a recent interview. “That already set out this curiosity of, ‘What was it like–it must have been so different?’ That was something that was always a question.”
A major motivation in their early interest in learning about their family history came after Palileo’s mother passed away when they were a teenager. In re-creating these memories, Palileo was able to process the grief and loss of their mother, they said.
These recoveries eventually led Palileo’s curiosity to their family’s earlier generations, prior to 1947, and has become a defining part of their practice. “It was just all new to me,” they said. “This history, even though it’s so entwined with American history, was completely not taught to me, and I ended up learning it through looking at these archives in Chicago. It was just a shock. Once I learned about the colonial relationship between the United States and the Philippines it just gave so much context to my family’s stories and why people are here.”
The painting that will feature at Art Basel Hong Kong, titled The Water Between Them (2024), Palileo just finished last month, shortly after returning from a nearly monthlong stay in the Philippines. During their time there, Palileo had visited several sites linked to their own familial history that came from Palileo’s “own personal desire to connect to a place where our family has history” and built on their archival research at various institutions like the University of Michigan and the Newberry Library in Chicago.
“A lot of my work now starts with photographic, archival research that I then mix with family histories or stories, from relatives or mentors, about Filipino spirituality,” they said. “I’m interested in the aspects of history that are buried within family stories and the things that they aren’t necessarily telling. The undertones of those stories have a more spiritual or superstitious aspect to them.”
In an email, David Kordansky said, “Maia is able to infuse rich colors, textures, and personal and broader histories onto the canvas, which is a testament to their deftness of both hand and mind. Their work speaks to stories as personal as their own family’s migration and as universal as the layering of memory and narrative across generations. In addition to being technically and visually compelling, Maia’s work, at its core, is deeply human and therefore deeply felt.”
To make their paintings, Palileo often creates collages based on that research that act as studies for the future work, what the artist described as “my way of piecing together existing material and transforming it into something that makes more sense to me” and to combat the fact archival images on their own, Palileo said, can be very “cut and dry” in a way that “flattens everything.”
That aspect of collage is evident in Palileo’s most recent works which have a layered quality with a flattened perspective that seem to collapse time and place. A shrouded larger-than-life figure, mounted on a horse, floats near to a distant waterfall, which is near the town where Palileo’s father is from.
Several of Palileo’s more recent canvases show dense and layered landscapes, which the artist said is meant to mirror the landscapes they’re depicting, in particular liana vines, which they described as “really beautiful but also parasitic. At some point in my research, I remember reading an American officer describing Filipinos as being lianas on the big tree that was America, but really it was the other way around.”
Though Palileo is better known for their paintings, sculpture has always been an important part of their practice and was their concentration for their MFA at Brooklyn College. Recently, the sculptures they’ve made draw their inspiration from figures in past paintings, as well as the santos and reliquaries from their Catholic upbringing. One such example, made for a 2021 exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco, features a woman whose hollow skirt is made from a chair caning. “Painting and sculpture are both, to me, like words in a sentence,” they said.
Another recent influence has been the late artist Denyse Thomasos, who was an artist in residence at Brooklyn College during Palileo’s time there and who Palileo encountered again in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. “In being with her paintings again, I remember talking about using line-work and research. She’s the one who taught me to be like a research-based artist. Those paintings were meant to be overwhelming. They’re spaces that are confining and yet there’s also like so much life in them,” they said.
In creating their paintings, Palileo wants to rethink what a landscape painting is. They partially accomplish this by bringing together disparate eras of art history, like Velázquez during the Spanish Golden Age and the Hudson River School, and using them as points of inquiry to think through how both of those movements are inextricably tied to different manifestations of colonization.
“I was thinking about not making a landscape painting in the way we teach kids to make a landscape painting,” they said. Maybe it’s horizontal, but it might not have a horizon line or a vanishing point, or objects that are closer maybe aren’t bigger—evening out the whole space of the painting where you don’t really know where you are.”
Source: artnews.com