A Season of Threes for Artist Les Amacio

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By Ted Aldwin Ong

Three auspicious openings mark Les Amacio’s dynamic start to 2026—a triple convergence that launches his season with bold momentum. He curates the group exhibition “Registered Point” at Fundació Sansò (February 5–March 14), unveils his solo show “When Did You Arrive?” at Finale Art File (February 6–March 3), and showcases major works with Underground Gallery at the recently wrapped ALT ART 2026.

In a white-walled gallery, his meticulously curated hyper-minimalist canvases, featuring perfectly aligned planes of white and red that tessellate through gradations of gray before diminishing into black, evoke themes drawn from cognitive neuroscience and studies of interiority. His paintings and curatorial projects offer compelling investigations into the complex, multidisciplinary landscape inhabited by cultural workers, while also reflecting his own evolution as an artist.

His minimalist, contemplative geometric abstractions, echoing the Mondrianesque precision of Piet Mondrian and the Rothkoesque expanses of color associated with Mark Rothko, balance emptiness and density, tension and tranquility. In doing so, Amacio emerges not merely as a painter of meditative worlds, but as a shaper of aesthetic discourse.

The work marks a clear departure from the styles he explored a decade ago, whether influenced by Damien Hirst and Jojo Legaspi or by Charlie Co and Manuel Ocampo.

Artist and Curator

In Registered Point, Les Amacio extends his geometric sensibility into the gallery space as a conceptual continuation of “Cultural Workers, Not Creative?”, staged at the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art in May 2025.

This collaboration with executive director Ricky Francisco expands discourse on professional labor in museum infrastructures, intersecting it with their artistic practices. It unites works by 46 Filipino artists and cultural workers, exploring fixed perceptions amid shifting contexts through paintings, spatial arrangements, and gallery relationships.

The exhibition probes how social, cultural, and personal reference points form in flux. Amacio’s static, thematic curation reflects the works’ diversity, creating a cohesive narrative.

The Cultural Workers initiative originated in Abu Dhabi among Louvre Abu Dhabi and Hasenkamp staff—art handlers, registrars, technicians, mounters, and conservators, many also practicing artists with whom Amacio worked abroad. Organized by Justin Amrhein, Eric John Eigner, and Mark Sengbusch, it highlighted the creative agency behind cultural institutions.

Amacio brought this ethos to the Philippines, partnering with Ricky Francisco (Fundacion Sansò), Julio Jose Austria (MoMa), and art writer Dave Lock. Refined with Rhaz Oriente, it became Cultural Workers Manila (CWmnl), a collective and curatorial platform linking transnational labor, migration, and artistic production to the Philippine context.

Visual Poetry

The title When Did You Arrive?—translated into Hiligaynon as “San-o ka nag-abot?,” a common greeting addressed to returning Overseas Filipino Workers—frames the exhibition’s conceptual grounding. In everyday use, the phrase signals reunion and recognition; in Amacio’s canvases, it becomes a meditation on presence, memory, and the body in space amid conditions of migration and displacement.

The show features 14 geometric abstractions that read like visual poetry, blending form with Amacio’s emotional history as a diasporic artist. Squares and rectangles create a subtle, funnel-like descent from light to darkness, acting like a gravitational pull that deliberately conjures a meditation on emptiness or nothingness.

Amacio writes: “Arrival is never singular. It is layered, haunted by the steps that came before and the distances that remain ahead. To arrive is to declare presence, yet it is also to carry the invisible weight of displacement… Arrival is not completion but a process, a reckoning with visibility and erasure, with intimacy and trust, with the fragile persistence of hope.”

The exhibition evokes liminality, thresholds, and boundaries through colors, textures, and forms, exploring how the self navigates the space between what has been left behind, what exists in the present, and what is yet to come.

Through abstraction, Amacio articulates the geometry of presence, triangulating experience, memory, and perception to render the unseen visible.

Arc of Continuity

The season culminated with major works presented by Underground Gallery at ALT ART 2026, featuring canvases of whites punctuated by a single red that mark a sense of rhythmic continuity. Within the art fair’s mise-en-scène of conceptual art in a commercial context, Amacio’s geometric abstractions engage immediate audience reception, from collectors to critics, highlighting a dialogue that spans intimate, collective, and public spheres.

Together, his three platforms—curatorial experimentation at Fundació Sansò, solo introspection at Finale Art File, and art fair presentation—trace a deliberate arc. As Amacio notes, “The collection of works attempts to show an end of a chapter and the start of a new page… not forgetting, never forgetting, as we continue with our journey in life.”

This trio exemplifies Les Amacio’s vision of geometry as a living language of memory, migration, and belonging. From silent canvases to shared spaces, it charts human thresholds, showing how the personal resonates within collective futures and propelling his practice toward ever bolder horizons.