06/05/2026
Sharing a few glimpses from the opening reception of "Quiet Calls" at the Upper Gallery 4 of Pinto Art Museum.
(I only managed to take a handful of photos as I was quite engaged to fellow artists, friends and guests during the event.)
"quiet calls"
Khervin John Gallandez
Light and shadow form the essential structure of Khervin John Gallandez’s figuration, a language he extends in his solo exhibition quiet calls. Across a suite of graphite drawings and a single anchor painting, the works gather into half-lit terrains—spaces where dark folklore, the paranormal, and a quieter kind of haunting converge.
The drawings unfold within minimal, indeterminate settings. They feel at once familiar and estranged, as if recalled from a dream or glimpsed in the pages of childhood illustration, now returning with a different weight. These are not fixed locations but states of perception, where the viewer is asked to linger without full clarity, allowing the images to register gradually in their layered, uneasy stillness.
Within these shadowed environments, small sources of illumination recur: lampposts, lanterns, the moon, even St. Elmo’s fire. Light, here, is never incidental. It operates as a point of orientation—a guide, a destination, or at times an active presence, suggesting something that moves, watches, or waits. Its glow does not dispel darkness; instead, it defines it, sharpening the sense of depth and distance within each scene.
Though many of the spaces appear uninhabited, their stillness is not empty. There is a sustained tension, a sense of presences that remain just beyond visibility. In several works, a girl appears—wandering, possibly lost, or quietly drawn toward these points of light. Her presence introduces a subtle narrative thread, though it resists resolution. She becomes less a character than a figure of passage, moving between what is seen and what is suggested.
The exhibition’s lone painting centers on an abandoned structure in Burgos, Ilocos Norte, alongside the Cape Bojeador Lighthouse. Immersed in the deep blue of afterdusk, the scene is punctuated by floating spheres of light that appear to enter the structure. Here, the familiar is gently unsettled: architecture becomes porous, and the boundary between the tangible and the imagined begins to shift. The quiet tension that runs through the drawings finds a different register in this work, where an atmosphere of unease is met with a measured, almost luminous calm.
—Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
