02/09/2026
🎨SEPTEMBER 4-15, 2026
📍 ART CENTER - 4th floor
SM Megamall Bldg. A, Mandaluyong City
✨Step into a space where every artwork tells a story, and every perspective invites you to see differently.
𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙏𝙊𝙉𝘿𝙊:
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬
𝑏𝑦 𝐂𝐈𝐃 𝐑𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐒
There is something inherently inviting about a round painting.
In the 19th century, Filipino painters produced small portraits meant to be kept in lockets, their circular or oval forms naturally becoming their frames. More than a century later, the circle would assume a very different significance in the work of National Artist José Joya.
The tondo, from the Italian rotondo, meaning “round,” has a history reaching back to antiquity. The Greeks painted circular scenes inside drinking vessels, while the Romans enclosed portraits within round, shield-like frames. But it was Renaissance Florence that transformed the tondo into a major pictorial form.
By the 15th century, the circular format had become especially associated with images of the Madonna and Child and the Holy Family. Artists such as Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Raphael, and Michelangelo did not simply fit their compositions into a circle. They allowed the circle to shape the composition itself. Bodies bend, heads turn inward, arms embrace, and gestures establish an invisible movement around the center. Raphael’s Alba Madonna gathers its figures into an intimate unity, while Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo creates a more muscular, sculptural energy. In both, the circle suggests both repose and movement.
Its appeal is not merely symbolic.
A circle has neither beginning nor end. Unlike the rectangle, with its four corners and fixed axes, it offers no obvious stopping point. The eye travels along the circumference, returns to the center, then moves outward again. It revolves, radiates, and circulates. Modern Artists rediscovered this potential. Kandinsky explored the circle as a vehicle for spiritual abstraction, while artists such as Ilya Bolotowsky, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella used the circular canvas to challenge the authority of the rectangle. The shape of the support itself became part of the work.
By the late 1960s and 1970s, Joya was seeking an abstraction that could move beyond the vocabulary of American Abstract Expressionism toward something more rooted in Filipino and Asian experience. The circle became one of his compelling answers. In his hands, circles suggest coins, discs, seeds, celestial bodies and vessels. They float, overlap and collide, creating rhythm while imposing order on spontaneity.
Perhaps this is the enduring poetry of the tondo. It encloses, yet does not imprison. It concentrates the eye while allowing movement to continue endlessly.
A Renaissance painter could see eternity in it. A modernist could see pure form.
A contemporary artist can see liberation from the rectangle.
Contemporary Filipino artists have taken up the challenge of the round canvas, discovering fresh possibilities for painting within its unfamiliar boundaries.
𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝙃𝙄𝙎𝙏𝙊𝙍𝙄𝘼 𝘼𝙍𝙏, the exhibition "𝘽𝙞𝙡𝙤𝙜" brings together their varied and often surprising responses to the circular format. Now several years into its run, “Bilog” was conceived and continues to be spearheaded by 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘷𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘳 𝘑. 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, current President of the Saturday Group.
For me, however, the fascination with the circle goes beyond its formal novelty. The mystery remains: why does something as simple as a circle make us feel that we are not merely looking at a picture, but entering a world?
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📍 3F, GH Mall, Greenhills, San Juan City
📍 Level 1, Building A, Tiendesitas Mall, Pasig City
📍 Unit 103, WPL Building, White Plains, Katipunan
Ave., Quezon City
📍 Unit 406, 4th Floor, Building A, SM Megamall,
Mandaluyong City
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🌐 http://historiaart.com.ph
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