What does it mean to paint historical paintings in the age of social media disinformation and deliberate digital manipulation? Seeing an image requires one to look from a distance, while painting is an act of emphasizing the image’s own materiality.

In this manner images are comparable to our culture’s own post-colonial legacy. Our history has been subjected to manipulation — re-composed and re-rendered — as with most images nowadays. When these episodes of our history are committed to the visual medium of painting, one is able to assert these scenes as recurrences within a paradigm of violence and dispossession — the consequences of an unfinished project of revolutionaries of the past.

This is how Aldrin Olaguer approaches his creative practice. Olaguer renders these events through a filter of historical truth, despite the contradiction that painting is inherently subjective, and is a tool by which one can craft a narrative. In this dilemma, Olaguer invites the viewer to examine traces of his process, to look deeper into these iconographies, and ascertain the truth for themselves.