Will o’wisps gather, encircling a line. There is a path marked by flecks of eerie light visible only by squinting up close. A landscape is out there. Curiosity for what lies beyond folds into disorientation then into surrender. These are the dynamics and layers, at once bewildering and dreamlike, which guide the eye experiencing the expansive paintings of Baler-based multidisciplinary artist Catalina Africa.
In a recent exhibition at Silverlens Manila titled mirrors, merging, Africa emerges with a series of portals, immersive and intricately detailed, that evokes an idiosyncratic, mythic vocabulary, crossed somewhere between The Legend of Zelda and Hindu devotional. I thought of both while looking at Africa’s paintings: mainly of their childlike accessibility and the focused attention necessary to access and sustain such a state, of the dungeons and of the supervision from the gods leading the way.
In our interview, Africa describes her works as inner sanctuaries, “places I’d visit in my imagination to ask and receive guidance, to lay offerings.” Creating this body of work during a very vulnerable time in her life, while she was mothering a newborn child, Africa describes the place her paintings inhabit as a near-fantastical, postpartum terrain, “a dark, open field, surrounded by my angels, ancestors, guardians and guides.”
Captured in the expansive world of Africa’s paintings, motherhood sits side-by-side her painting practice: “Painting became a place where I could channel and distill all my scattered postpartum thoughts and feelings. It really became a tool to mirror this intense transformation.”
Explaining her frame of mind while creating these “pregnancy paintings,” as she calls her latest body of work, Africa introduces me to the term “matrescence.” In one study published in 2023, matrescence is defined as the “profound environmental, hormonal, and neurobiological changes [which] mark the transition to motherhood as a major biosocial life event.” Though matrescence’s life-altering shifts are not exactly explicit in these paintings, the scenes dramatized in mirrors, merging are suffused with the potential of transformation, keeping you on edge as though something is just about to happen right across the corner of your frame of vision.
I couldn’t help but think of Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters, which traced the fallout of Jamison’s marriage as she simultaneously experienced the newfound responsibilities, intensities, and pleasures of motherhood. In one chapter, she explains how her experience of time has changed since becoming a mother. Prior to motherhood, Jamison likened time to currency. “Time was the instrument of my endless ambition,” she wrote, “which was itself a frantic thing.”
But as a mom, with its mundane yet life-giving rhythms of breastfeeding, nursing, and the endless to-do lists to keep the baby healthy and alive, Jamison saw time morph into something else entirely: “But with my baby, time became something else—an element to be gotten through, swum like water… The point was simply moving through the hours.”
Across mirrors, merging, Africa envisions time similarly—fluid and free-flowing, dripping into bodies of water. Here, simple forms expand outward into whimsical worlds unto themselves. This movement is complicated by Africa’s attention to reciprocality: the dynamic of expansion, in Africa’s eyes, always comes down to an exchange of energies that never simply goes one way. The painting “Flowform Study/Inner Waters” features a heart-shaped lake that blossoms from a cave-like dwelling, while nurturing inside it a womb-like entity.
Thinking about Africa’s work, or trying to pin down a description in a sentence, can feel like a futile task of sorts, like trying to describe the particularities of your favorite perfume. Grammar defaults to mishmash as it attempts to capture the work’s labyrinthine, unpinnable dimensions, the strange logic taking shape in these paintings.
As I sat down to write about what I saw, my notes ended up a jumble of flat phrases, their syntax flailing around like a sad, deflated balloon. Perplexing construction—nouns and prepositions interweaving and compounding—gave way to perplexing description: The moon rose from the cave inside the lake. Beyond the trees lies the water through the beaming light, inside further, the mother.
This mystification of language that Africa’s works provoke seems to enrich, rather than deplete, my understanding of her practice in ways that I’m still trying to apprehend. These aren’t anarchic works by design, but parsing through Africa’s landscapes can often feel like encountering a mystic’s journal: talismanic images, like the moon, the womb and teardrops, recur, corroborating a theory of conception. Speaking of the power of symbolism in her work, Africa sees power in repetition and accrual: “They are archetypal images—images I return to over and again because their meaning changes each time, because painting them gives them power.”
As a new mother, Africa describes her experience much like “semantic rearrangement,” how everything was rearranging and coming undone inside of her, and across these paintings, we too seem to come undone by these porous landscapes. Encountering the generous terrains of Africa’s latest works, I thought of all the secrets and quiet confessions that the land and the lake, the grass and the forest, can emit. Those disclosures, so visceral yet so ungraspable, that would drive Thoreau to escape to the woods in an attempt to confront “only the essential facts of life,” or galvanize a heartbroken Justin Vernon to retreat to a Wisconsin hunting cabin and record those chilly, devastating dirges. But in Africa’s case, these secrets only lead her to widen her field of vision outward.
One of Africa’s intentions, it seems, is to put our wonder to work. Africa entrusts her audience with symbols and talismans that function like guardians. In a painting called “Collapsing Time,” a threshold offers an opening for verdant green trees to surface, amidst tendrils of scorching, searching crimsons. It’s not quite accurate to say that mirrors, merging departs from her previous exhibitions, but this new exhibition expands an already vast scope, and leads us deeper, pulls us ever so closer into Africa’s cartography of dreams and oddities.