CHATI CORONEL
Chati Coronel (b. 1970, Manila; lives and works in Toronto) makes paintings the way stars make light—layer by layer, from the void outward. Her work is not about the figure, but the force within it. For over thirty years, she has wielded pigment like a tuning fork, using color and silhouette not to represent the body, but to awaken what it remembers. She calls this process Figurative Spatialism: a practice where figure becomes space, and space becomes memory, and memory becomes a portal.
Trained in architecture but led by spirit, Coronel’s work is a metaphysical excavation. Each painting is built from many translucent layers—each one a breath, a veil, a step further back toward the source. Her canvases are not surfaces. They are thresholds. Cosmology and mysticism are not references in Coronel’s work—they are the air it breathes. With a discipline rooted in daily spiritual practice, she paints as if building a bridge between dimensions. The nervous system becomes a wand. The heart becomes the grail. The spine becomes the sword. Her paintings do not speak in image—they transmit in frequency.
Her work has been shown internationally—Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze Seoul, The Armory Show New York—and lives in collections across Asia and North America. But its true home is the liminal, the spiritual, the unseen. Chati Coronel paints not to be understood, but to be felt—deeply, bodily, tectonically. Chati Coronel is represented by Silverlens Gallery.
EXHIBITION: NOTES FOR EXALTATION
SILVERLENS GALLERY, MANILA, 19JULY -16AUG 2025
Silverlens is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Chati Coronel, opening 19 July 2025 with an opening reception from 5 to 8 PM.
“We are born knowing,” Chati Coronel writes in her artist statement for Notes for Exaltation, her ninth solo exhibition with Silverlens. Coronel is known for her multi-layered paintings created through a process she refers to as Figurative Spatialism. Here, she paints layers of abstract movement in raw strokes and contains them in a color space that forms a human figure’s silhouette. Her work is informed by a wide range of influences, including Rudolf Steiner, Louis Kahn, poetry, fables, and Tibetan Buddhist thought.
In Notes for Exaltation, Chati Coronel presents six large paintings that continue her search for intrinsic knowledge and power, drawing inspiration from figures in Tarot and ancient Gnostic verses. Framed by her ongoing interest in what she refers to as Human Power—an innate intelligence displaced by systems of efficiency and control—the exhibition invites viewers to turn inward and reconnect with the self.
Four of the works in the exhibition forgoes the human figure, urging the viewer to see themselves within the worlds depicted. Each work corresponds to one of the four instruments of the Magus (Magician) in tarot, the first Major Arcana card in traditional tarot decks, reimagined as anatomical blueprints. Alongside it are two paintings that underscore the human as simultaneously one whole and a fragment of something bigger. Further engaging with dualities, the works speak in contradictions: divine and fallen; known and hidden.
Disguised as paintings, the six works in Notes for Exaltation are coded messages, sigils, ritual objects designed to pull at each viewer’s invisible strings. Through the exhibition, Coronel seeks to awaken what lies dormant in each viewer, in the hope that they remember.
Notes for Exaltation by Chati Coronel will be on view from 19 July until 16 August 2025 at Silverlens, Manila.
(words by Angel Stinson)
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A Note on Authenticity
Chati Coronel’s creative practice honors the tangible—the texture of canvas, the weight of paper, the presence that the works plus the materials possess together. Each piece exists as a singular expression, born from direct engagement with materials and meant to be encountered in physical form.
The artist does not create or authorize digital tokens or NFTs of this work. The authentic experience of these pieces lives solely in their original, physical manifestation.