About the Artwork/s
Filipino contemporary artist Miguel Paulo Borja’s opus is savage but never petty. A self-proclaimed “mark-maker, print-scraper, and brush-destroyer”, Borja’s gestural stroke work is a show-and-tell between worlds and spaces, time and perception, reality and delusion. In his wild lucid paintings, he creates images with an abiding sense of structure, balance, and compositional technique, seeking a style even further removed from mimesis and preoccupied with surface, color, and medium. Beginning with drawing and schema, Borja builds layers of abstraction to explore spirituality and duality through paint, sometimes eschewing narrative content or figuration.
The physical act of painting is of paramount importance to Borja’s approach and is apparent in his finished products. Each image, whether done in abstraction or figuration, displays their physical, psychological, and emotional responses to the world. His latest works moved towards a purer exploration of color and form, abandoning spatial convention. At times, Borja demonstrates this style of painting highlighting form, shape, and color with allusions to still life, rough lines, and ambiguous focal points.
About the Artist
Miguel Paulo Borja (b. 1987) is a visual artist working mostly in acrylic and oil paint. He often combines the impasto stroke-work of abstract impressionism and a heavy influence of the more analytical surrealist creating worlds of his own. His style is raw and unapologetic, much like his process which gives way for a communion between will and accident; form and abstraction. A recent shift in Borja’s works is the effect of his deliberate action of stepping back to allow his art to breathe. With a constant strive to push boundaries, the result gives a quality of an experimental and fresh process. Movement, Borja received his BFA in Painting at University of Santo Tomas. He exhibits his works in Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Jakala and London.
