KWEN2RA: Painting a Better World gathers six artists whose practices reflect on the conditions of living, imagining, and rebuilding. Working across painting, abstraction, surrealism, and narrative image-making, the exhibition proposes that the idea of a better world is not singular or fixed, but shaped through multiple ways of seeing and feeling.

For Robert Labayen, artistic practice expands beyond the canvas into a broader creative life shaped by music, writing, and performance. His paintings, influenced by fauvism and naif traditions, carry a deliberate sense of lightness and joy. Figures, flowers, and scenes of labor become expressions of dignity and hope, aligned with social concerns such as child welfare, education, environmental care, and livelihood. His works articulate a vision of a world grounded in care, where effort and compassion are recognized and sustained.

Anna Maniego approaches painting through an intimate dialogue between language and image. Rooted in poetry, her abstractions translate emotional experience into fields of color, gesture, and movement. The works hold space for vulnerability while offering a counterpoint of luminosity and release. By extending her practice into sound and text, she invites viewers into a reflective encounter where personal transformation becomes inseparable from the act of imagining a more compassionate world.

Angelo Valmoria Roxas frames painting as a site of philosophical reflection. His compositions unfold through symbolic and surreal imagery, where figures and recurring motifs suggest states of endurance, faith, and renewal. The works move through interior landscapes shaped by memory and questioning, proposing that transformation begins in the unseen dimensions of experience. In this way, the paintings align with the exhibition’s premise by foregrounding reflection, empathy, and the possibility of change.

Tyron Santos constructs visual worlds drawn from the density of contemporary image culture. His compositions bring together fragments from comics, digital media, and everyday visual references, resulting in scenes that are at once playful and unsettling. For this exhibition, his focus turns to marine life, where surreal encounters point to the fragility of ecological systems and the complexity of human intervention. Humor and absurdity serve as entry points for a deeper consideration of environmental responsibility.

Gerlie Mae Urbano’s works navigate the intersection of the psychological and the material. Combining elements of realism and surrealism across traditional and digital media, she examines the emotional weight of accumulation and the act of release. Her compositions transform this tension into a movement toward clarity, suggesting that the process of letting go can reshape both inner and external environments. The works propose healing as an essential component of building a more attentive and balanced world.

Lloreen Nicole Roxas presents landscapes that exist between observation and imagination. Her paintings evoke quiet, suspended spaces where nature appears both familiar and distant. Through a language that merges naturalism with an ethereal sense, she constructs environments that suggest stillness, restoration, and possibility. These images point toward a world shaped by care for the environment and an awareness of the fragile equilibrium between human presence and the natural order.

Across these distinct practices, KWEN2RA: Painting a Better World suggests that transformation is both internal and collective. The exhibition brings together works that engage with care, resilience, imagination, and responsibility, proposing that a better world emerges through sustained acts of attention and creation.

A portion of the proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to the ABS-CBN Foundation.