Riel Jaramillo Hilario

In partnership with Tin-Aw Gallery
April — June 2018

Riel Jaramillo Hilario (1976 - 2021) was a visual artist, cultural worker, writer, and curator. He began his training as a woodcarver working with a traditional santo-maker in his hometown in Vigan, Ilocos Sur. Hilario contemporized the traditional technique from the last carver of a family of santo-carvers from Ilocos Sur. His carved wooden sculpture was inspired by his research in peculiar experiences and phenomena associated with churches, old houses, museums, archaeological sites, and forests. Hilario was the curator of the Pinto Art Museum from 2012-2015.

Hilario was a Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artist Awardee (2012). His work has been shown in several exhibitions in Adelaide, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Basel, Delhi, New York, Paris and Berlin. He has been artist-in-residence in Paris at the Cite Internationale des Arts (2012) and in New York at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2013) as a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council.

Missing the Forest for the Trees

15.06.2018
Kapitana Gallery

The  exhibition, Missing the Forest for the Trees, was about creating contemporary "anito" figures that represented the presences that I felt in the local environment. It's a project I've been doing for my sculpture since 2007: to create personifications of energy, ghosts, spirits and other presences that are unseen but felt. Being a spiritist and part time medium, I often am connected to many layers of reality that are superimposed on everyday reality. In noticing details of the metaphysical and the paranormal I often lose track of the matrix of my everyday reality and get lost in the life of my mind. So I always tell myself to look at the trees but don't miss the forest. There may be many layers of reality but only this corporeal one is relevant to me now. Otherwise I'll go mad. Or worse, believe in such nonsense as being "the appointed son of God" and suffer grandiosity on such (a) weird scale.

In Greek we call this mesotes, the middle way. Between the extremes of being an animal and a madman / God, I choose to be human-all-too-human.

“—I concluded my only local artist residency through the ABungalow Program of Balay ni Tana Dicang c/o Adrian Lizares and Tin-aw Art Gallery through Dawn Justiniani Atienza. I spent 3 to 4 months carving these sculptures from the santol wood that was cut especially for me. To this day I can truly say that only this residency fulfilled all my needs as a sculptor/ artist. Even the studio, the benches and the wood carving studio were built to my specifications.”