Painters of terrains of feeling
To step into the worlds of Wonhee “Whee” Delgado and Mark Andy Garcia is to enter terrains where emotion is not merely depicted but dwelled in — where landscapes become vessels of memory, and surfaces pulse with the quiet storm of lived experience. For both painters, the canvas is less a site of representation than of revelation: a place where feeling takes form, where the invisible weight of interior life—its reckonings, ruptures, and rare stillnesses—is rendered with fidelity.
In “Silent Scream,” which opened last Sunday, May 4 at Ilustrado I of Gallery 7, Pintô Art Museum and Arboretum, the Manila- and Seoul-based artist Whee strips away the ornamental, reaching instead for the visceral: rough textures like wounds weathered by time, colors that bruise and bloom, gestures that break apart the surface to reveal what trembles underneath. In this body of work, painting becomes not an image but an event—a moment of quiet rupture, a scream that doesn’t need sound to be heard.
Educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and Seoul National University, Whee has long walked the thresholds—between countries, between disciplines, and between the self she inherited and the one she continues to unfold. Her early years in Seoul saw the emergence of a restless inquiry into the body and its burdens, earning her the Competition Award at Kunst Dog for “Idolic Bonanza” in 2013. Over time, her practice has grown increasingly elemental, moving away from the symbolic and into the raw, unfiltered energies that pulse beneath appearances.
“I aim to abandon form, to relinquish the space for interpretation, and to arrive at the very foundation of painting,” the artist shares. “Like vines that intertwine—soft yet destructive, persistent in their vitality—I seek to immerse myself in infinity through paintings that are alive with rough textures and vibrant, powerful colors. What is visible now pursues the truth of the unseen, the immaterial.”
On view at West Gallery in Quezon City until May 10 is Garcia’s “Good Stories to Tell.” In this exhibition, the artist turns inward, reflecting upon the experiences and quiet reckonings that come with crossing the invisible threshold of 40—that age, long mythologized as the point “where life begins.” For Garcia, it marks neither an end nor a new chapter, but a space of pause, of looking back and forward all at once, with equal parts tenderness and clarity.
Central to the exhibition are two self-portraits—one set against a still life, the other against a landscape—each drawing from the artist’s most familiar and favored genres. These are not simply exercises in formal depiction, but contemplations of identity, temporality, and presence. In both, the artist faces the viewer directly, his gaze unwavering, clear-eyed, devoid of artifice. He does not dramatize his presence. Dressed in a plain shirt, he is simply a man in the world—one who has seen enough, who carries his days with a quiet kind of grace, and who chooses now to speak, softly but surely.
“Good Stories to Tell” is a meditation on presence and passage, on the act of recording life not just as it is seen, but as it is felt. There is melancholy here, but also gentleness. There is loss, yes—but it is tempered by an understanding that some things remain. That some light stays. That some scenes can still be held. And that, in art as in life, not all is gone. Sometimes, if we are lucky, there are still good stories to tell.
