Paglantaw presents Aroma Art Academy artists Darby Alcoseba, Lucas Rañola, Maria Francisca, Mark Belicario, Orley Ypon, and Rainer Duhaylungsod, and offers a naturalistic glimpse into the artists’ perspectives of life in their respective hometowns in Cebu and their attempts to speculate other ways of depicting such realities.

Besides hailing from the same locality, what brings the members of Aroma together is a collective reverence for the storied history of Cebuano realism. The artists’ merging of classic tradition with the contemporary condition breathes life into tired conventions of realist art that often relegate it to the realm of oversimplified and over commodified ruralism.

The artists return to their roots by way of repurposing the fundamentals that characterise their practice, such as familiar subjects, recognizable color palettes, and distinct approaches to the quiet and the ordinary. Stripped of stylization and steeped in the methods of meticulous figuratism, the exhibition finds beauty in the quotidian of contemporary Filipino life.