Points and Endings is Keka Enriquez’s first solo exhibition in Manila since 2008, showing some of her early works made in Manila and her latest oil on canvas paintings created in San Francisco, her home city in the last 20 years. It is on view at Silverlens Galleries, Makati until February 5, 2025.
Interiority
Enriquez is known for her expressionistic paintings characterized by textured brushstrokes, high tactility, and bold colors. Centered on domestic interiors, her work explores the meaning of home, identity, gender, and displacement. It subverts conventional notions of home where memories are made in happy and sad times and delves into the psychological and sociocultural layers of domestic space.
The more time you spend with her work and observe them closely focusing your gaze, the more things you will find revealing themselves. Its sense of interiority comes to you slowly, out of the seemingly jumbled thick strokes of the brush and dash of colors.
Suppertime (1995): A dark brown table surrounded by blue chairs is set with silverware, fine china, and goblets. A chandelier hangs over the table; some musical instruments are lined against the wall. Painted in vivid reds and yellows, in heavy and thick brushstrokes, curtains hung in walls with glass windows.
Is it a table waiting for company or is it for no one? Amidst all the finery, everything looks jagged, cluttered, or twisted in surrealist details that give the work an unsettling edge.
Birdcage on the Chair, (1997): A home is a safe space until it is not; it could be a cage, a prison, a trap. A critique on how society confines women within the domestic sphere with little agency, narrowly tied down to their traditional roles of wife and mother.
Woman with Four Heads, (2003): A painting full of memories and associations like a visual stream-of-consciousness: images and figures, scenes: structures and interiors, a man’s brooding face, a sketch of a woman with four heads that speak of decisions and choices to make or unmake. No rights or wrongs, but there are always consequences.
In several new works created in 2024, Enriquez revisits childhood memories, fantasies and fears, play and imagination in Childhood and Childhood and Weird Tales, with its predominance of greens and yellows and enmeshed images of children at play. In Japanese Garden, several chairs occupy the lush scene in tones of green, blue, and lavender with a baby and a mother in the background.
Keka Enriquez (b. 1962)
In a 2024 interview with Silverlens New York, Enriquez describes herself as “an intuitive painter” as she does not do any studies to her paintings; instead, she does quick drawings on the canvas itself.
She describes her work today as looser in brushstrokes, and includes figures and images, faces and people that are abstracted but still recognizable images. In contrast, her work in the past was mostly interiors devoid of people and living beings. Now, her paintings have exterior elements such as landscapes —the sky, the lake, and animals.
Since working as a recreational therapist, she has incorporated dogs, cats, and birds into her work now, recognizing them as sentient beings in healing people.
Taking a break
In 1998, Enriquez moved to San Francisco, California leaving her hectic life in Manila as an artist where she used to paint nonstop almost like a machine. Falling in love and getting married, she had wanted “a different life” and “a normal life” that in her mind would have included raising kids, being a good wife, and supporting her husband.
She eventually started working fulltime as a recreational therapist in a hospital, adding complexity to her life. Turning her back from art was a deliberate action, a deliberate decision then, Enriquez explains.
Restarting
She started painting again in 2023. “I missed painting so much. …I forget how much I love the process…”. Enriquez recalls that the simple act of selecting colors and mixing them, having the right brush, the whole ritual of painting again from scratch “gave me a high.”
Last year, Enriquez took part in two exhibits in New York that marked her return to painting: Odds and Ends in May and a group exhibit at the Armory Show in September.
As she notes, “I have always been interested in form, brushstrokes, color and experimentation to the point that subject matter becomes only incidental. In terms of subject matter, the home and every physical, psychological, sociological aspects of it.”
She looks forward to continuing with her painting, her experimentations, and trying out some new materials.
A recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards in 1994, Enriquez earned her BFA from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 1987 as well as an MFA from Norwich School of Art and Design England in 1995. She has exhibited her work in the Philippines, United States, England, Australia, Taiwan, Hongkong, and Malaysia.