OPENING ON July 11, 2026

Artery Art Space is proud to present a series of studies for painting by Jon Cuyson in conjunction with Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig, the Philippines’ official representative to this year’s prestigious Venice Biennale in Italy. The works at Artery serve as intuitive approaches for exploring painting as an extended field that dives into the socio-political context of the sea. For the artist everything is painting when it comes to establishing and extending the concept of representation, where identity becomes the contested site for engagement and discursivity that painting here provides.

In this series each design presents a variety of gestures that combine impulses from Abstract Expressionism - if Pollock’s free flowing/off the wall/painterly drip approach is to be considered, along with the bleeding stains of Colour field painting, mixed with the urgent material presence of Minimalism plus the coolness of Pop. The colors applied on the works blend the bluish green aura of marine life with the violet metallic spectrum of industry. While the silvery plane of the painting moves like the shifting of sand tossed by the sea across international shores, or perhaps, the shiny steel plates of sea vessels cutting across the waves. The artist has further introduced handmade sculptural elements to interrupt the introspective space of the painting with concerned traces of the Anthropocene pointing to man’s handprint on nature.

These are evidenced by everyday things such as coins for economic currency, a straw as a modern tool for drinking, keys to property, and currently, Cuyson’s interest on mussel shells as witnesses to ecological time that are silent survivors of evolution and interdependent collaborators for progressive change. These painting studies for Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig are unique in bridging pensive marginal narratives across Cuyson’s more ambitious project at the Venice Biennale, which is prompted here by painting’s diverse practice of representation and expression that conflates art history with critical concepts of origin, orientations, and temporal marks of the fragile world.

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Jon Cuyson is a Filipino interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, artist books, and film. For over two decades, he has explored intersections of identity, movement, labor, and ecological entanglement, often navigating the shifting boundaries between fact and fiction. In 2010, he founded Everyday Productions, a conceptual platform that operates as both laboratory and methodology for experimentation across art, cinema, and design. His projects are shaped by Memory Modules, interconnected works that act as partial archives for submerged histories, maritime labor, and fragments of belonging. More recently, he has developed Mussel Thinking, a framework where mussels serve as ecological collaborators and metaphors for filtration, sedimentation, and clustering. This methodology emphasizes porousness, care, and interdependence, extending his engagement with queer ecologies and wet ontologies. Cuyson constructs immersive environments that reimagine how memory, desire, and ecology interlace across personal and collective histories. His work often blurs distinctions between art and design, installation and scenography, fiction and document, producing spaces that are at once vulnerable and transformative. He earned his MFA in Painting from Columbia University, New York (2010) and is currently based in Manila, Philippines, where he continues to live and work. Jon Cuyson is the official representative of the Philippines at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in May 2026.

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