THERE is softness in her
strokes.
Her works — titled “Purity,”“Innocence,”“Inner
Silence,”“Lotus”— evoke femininity and serenity.
Her subjects are seemingly caught in
moments of deep thought and reflection, trapped in the ambers that are her
canvasses.
These creations by Anne Catherine “Kat”
Malazarte adorn the walls of the gallery of Casa Real de Iloilo, the old
provincial capitol, as part of her first solo exhibit, “Peaceful Defiance.”
Eight of her works are on display,
painted in different mediums and bearing different shapes and sizes, each
representing the virtues the artist wants to preserve.
“The
eight paintings depict the values and attributes I hold dear and protect:
purity, innocence, chastity, modesty, inner silence, contemplation, and state
of nothingness,” says Malazarte, a fourth-year fine arts student at the
University of San Agustin in Iloilo City.
“While
[I exist] with opposing environment and people, these attributes remain intact
like a lotus flower,” she muses.
Most of Malazarte’s works have women,
some with striking resemblance to her, as subjects.
This is most noticeable in “Purity,” a
portrait of a woman clutching a white cloth against her chest, painted on
circular wood — a unique substitute for the usual canvas.
“Lotus,”
the largest painting in the collection, shows a woman in deep sleep.
“Modesty,”
on the other hand, was a woman clad in traditional attire, a scarf around her
hair, golden patterns emerging from her closed eyes.
“Peaceful
Defiance”reveals the manifold personalities of a young female visual artist —
calm and collected, lost deep in thought, glowing with the intensity of gold.
It is part of a series of exhibits the
Iloilo Visual Artists Collective is putting up leading to the Visayas Visual
Artists Exhibition and Conference in November 2016.
The exhibit, which started on Nov. 27,
runs through Dec. 19 this year at the Calle Real Gallery.
