EXHIBITION: NOTES FOR EXALTATION
SILVERLENS GALLERY, MANILA, 19JULY -16AUG 2025
NOTES FOR EXALTATION: ARTIST STATEMENT
NOTES FOR EXALTATION is an act of memory—a confrontation with the quiet theft of Human Power. Not the kind that dominates, but the kind that listens, creates, loves, wills, and remembers. It is the type of power that has no flag, no title, no currency. It is the birthright that was slowly bled out of us through systems built to tame.
We are born knowing. Born attuned. But our knowing is replaced with obedience. Our inner signals are muted, overwritten by noise and novelty. We are trained to outsource our intelligence, our connection, our capacity for stillness. The light dims gradually. The forgetting is so elegant we don’t even notice.
For thirty years, I have painted in search of that original spark. Through layers of pigment, I have chased the thread that ties the nervous system to the stars. Every painting is a return, a remembering, a map made of marks. My work is less about image than it is about resonance. These are not representations; they are transmissions.
I am not concerned with culture. Culture is the dream we enter when we have forgotten who we are. It is collective mythology, and while it has its place, my work seeks what lies before and beneath it. I dig into the soil of the psyche to retrieve what was buried: the ability to feel, to know, to initiate.
The body is not just a vessel. It is an instrument. A staff, a sword, a grail. The nervous system is a wand—flexing, receiving, signaling. The heart is the grail—open, overrun, radiant. The spine is the sword—steady, essential, overlooked. I paint as if composing symphonies for these organs of light. The goal is not to impress the eye but to stir the body. I paint to touch the invisible string inside someone and make it hum.
Each painting begins as a descent—into stillness, into darkness, into the threshold of knowing—and rises like a breath remembered. The process is devotional, alchemical. I paint to reach. What I create are not just objects, but catalysts. My work is not meant to embellish your life—it is meant to crack it open.
We are not machines. The height of our power is not in building artificial intelligence to replace our own but in reclaiming the power we have surrendered. To feel deeply. To be present. To awaken from the anesthesia of modern life.
NOTES FOR EXALTATION is not a quiet show. It is a call to attention. A call to return. These paintings are mirrors that do not reflect the face, but the force inside it. They are maps, hymns, and instructions—leading back to Source.
We are upside-down trees. Our roots are above. The divine trickles down, if we allow it. The Source is not out there—it is within.
I paint to remind you:
You are the Grail.
You are the Wand.
You are the Sword.
You are the Light.
Now rise.
CHATI CORONEL’S
FIGURATIVE SPATIALISM
I begin in silence.
Not metaphorical silence—real, dimensional quiet. A void, made of color. A field that doesn’t depict anything but remembers everything. This is not background. This is origin. Each painting begins with this void. It is my way of reaching back—before form, before thought, before time. A state of unity, of oneness. From here, I build. Layer by layer.
The second layer: transmission. Semi-translucent symbols float above the void—gestures pulled from the margins of esoteric texts, cosmological diagrams, Gnostic hymns, alchemical blueprints. These marks do not explain; they invoke. They come from a spiritual practice older than language. They are the quiet codes of a body trying to remember its source.
Then come the silhouettes. Figures—but not portraits. These are not individuals. These are human thresholds. Empty forms surrounded by atmosphere. I do not fill them; I leave them open. The body becomes space. The body becomes the opening. You do not look at it—you look through it. Inside each silhouette is the earlier work: the symbols, the void, the memory of stillness. You see it only through absence.
And then I do it again. More layers. More openings. I am not painting a moment. I am painting time. Each layer is a breath, a door, a veil. A spiritual muscle being stretched outward from my center until I meet the edge of form—until the painting arrives and says: this is the boundary. Stop here. I paint from the inside out. I do not plan; I listen. The painting tells me when to pause, when to seal, when to split open. The final work holds the entire journey. It is an excavation of light from darkness. An offering.
My process is devotional but not soft. This is a rebellion against forgetting. Against the flattening of spirit into product. Against the empire of speed. I don’t paint what is seen. I paint what is felt when silence speaks. What is revealed when softness becomes strategy. When the body becomes cosmos, and the image becomes a door. Every silhouette I leave empty is an invitation: Look again. Feel harder. Remember. What emerges is not an image—it’s a map. A vessel. A layered transmission meant to be seen with the body, not the eye. These works do not speak in caption. They speak in pulse. You don’t have to understand them. You have to stand in front of them.
They will do the rest.