Carlo Juntado’s A Surreal Ecology for an Uncertain Present

By Noel Galon de Leon

There Is Something in the Air, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches, 2026

What makes Carlo Juntado’s There Is Something in the Air particularly interesting today is that its surrealism can be read through the contemporary experience of ecological uncertainty. The title itself becomes more suggestive when considered against a world increasingly preoccupied with what cannot always be seen but can nevertheless be felt: polluted air, changing climates, disappearing habitats, extreme weather, environmental anxiety, and the gradual transformation of familiar landscapes. Juntado does not produce an environmental painting in the conventional documentary sense. There are no explicit images of ecological destruction, no statistics, no recognizable disaster, and no obvious political slogan. Instead, he creates an atmosphere in which the natural world appears unusually alive, watchful, and psychologically charged. The strange feeling that something is present in the air becomes an imaginative equivalent of contemporary ecological unease. The painting asks us to consider whether the environment is merely the setting in which human life takes place or whether it possesses its own forms of presence, memory, and agency.

This question becomes more compelling through Juntado’s decision to anthropomorphize the trees. Their faces disrupt the familiar distinction between human consciousness and the nonhuman world. They appear almost like ancient witnesses, watching the strange gathering below them. In an era when environmental thought increasingly challenges the assumption that humans exist at the center of every ecological system, these trees can be understood as more than fantastical characters. They become visual arguments against human exceptionalism. Their presence suggests that the landscape may have its own consciousness, or at least its own history, even if that history cannot be translated into ordinary human language. The painting therefore participates, perhaps unintentionally, in a broader contemporary artistic concern with giving visibility to nonhuman forms of existence. The trees do not simply decorate the landscape. They occupy it as subjects.

The central owl-like creature intensifies this ecological reading because its enormous body functions almost like an ecosystem in miniature. A human figure exists inside it, surrounded and protected by a nonhuman form. This reversal is significant. Instead of imagining nature as something humans enter only to exploit, observe, classify, or control, Juntado imagines the human being as literally contained within another living presence. The relationship is strangely intimate. The creature becomes shelter, organism, landscape, and psychological interior simultaneously. In this sense, the painting proposes an alternative relationship between human identity and the natural world. The human does not stand outside nature looking inward. The human is already inside it.

This idea also makes the painting relevant to contemporary conversations about memory and environmental change. Landscapes are often treated as repositories of personal and collective memory, but landscapes can also disappear, mutate, or become unrecognizable. Trees are cut down, waterways are altered, agricultural spaces are converted, and familiar places become commercial or urban environments. Juntado’s fantastical landscape can therefore be approached as a kind of memory-space, a place where things that may no longer exist materially continue to exist imaginatively. The exaggerated colors and impossible creatures do not necessarily make the landscape less believable. Paradoxically, they may make it more emotionally truthful. Memory rarely reproduces the world exactly as it was. It intensifies certain colors, enlarges certain figures, suppresses certain details, and combines unrelated experiences into a single psychic image. Juntado’s surrealism operates according to precisely this logic.

The work is also timely because contemporary visual culture is increasingly dominated by technologically generated images. In an age of artificial intelligence, digital simulation, virtual environments, and endlessly reproducible visual content, Juntado’s materially constructed fantasy acquires another layer of significance. The painting reminds us that imagination does not have to depend upon photorealistic accuracy to produce a convincing world. Its creatures are impossible, yet the world they inhabit feels coherent because the artist has established a visual grammar through color, repetition, scale, gesture, and symbolic association. This distinction matters. AI-generated images can produce an astonishing quantity of surreal combinations, but artistic imagination involves more than the ability to combine unusual forms. It involves decisions about why those forms belong together and what emotional or cultural tensions they carry. Juntado’s painting demonstrates that surrealism becomes meaningful when strangeness is organized by intention rather than novelty alone.

This raises an important contemporary question: what happens to imagination when images become almost infinitely easy to generate? There Is Something in the Air offers an implicit answer. Imagination remains valuable not because it produces something visually unprecedented at every moment, but because it creates relationships between things that otherwise appear disconnected. Juntado connects trees with human faces, birds with myth, animals with psychological states, celestial bodies with earthly environments, and the human body with a creature large enough to become a shelter. These relationships produce meaning precisely because they are not literal. The painting asks the viewer to participate in interpretation rather than simply consume an image.

There is also something particularly productive about the work’s refusal to identify a single mythology. Its visual vocabulary feels close to folklore, fable, children’s illustration, dream imagery, and contemporary fantasy, but it does not settle comfortably into any one category. This openness allows the work to participate in conversations about how cultural memory survives. Myth is not necessarily something locked in the past. It can be reconstructed, distorted, reinvented, and made strange again. Juntado’s creatures feel as though they might belong to a story that existed before the viewer arrived, yet the viewer is never given enough information to reconstruct that story completely. That incompleteness is one of the painting’s strengths. It respects the imaginative intelligence of the audience.

The apple held near the central figure becomes especially interesting in this context. Its associations with knowledge, temptation, education, mythology, and human curiosity are already deeply embedded in Western visual culture, but within Juntado’s ecosystem it becomes detached from a single canonical meaning. It could represent knowledge entering the imagination, an object of desire, a memory of childhood, or simply a familiar symbol placed into an unfamiliar world. This is where the painting becomes more than a collection of fantastical images. Juntado demonstrates how recognizable symbols can be displaced from their traditional contexts and made available for new readings. Contemporary art often works through precisely this process of taking inherited cultural signs and asking what they can mean now.

The painting’s animals likewise complicate the distinction between the familiar and the uncanny. The owl-like central figure, frog-like creature, black bird, and small red animal are recognizable enough to trigger cultural associations, yet their scale and placement make them psychologically strange. This is important because contemporary ecological consciousness often begins with a similar destabilization. We recognize animals, trees, skies, and landscapes as familiar, but their relationships to us are becoming increasingly unfamiliar as environmental conditions change. Juntado’s surrealism therefore provides an imaginative language for a world in which familiarity itself can no longer be taken for granted.

At the same time, the work should not be forced into an environmental interpretation at the expense of its playful qualities. One of its achievements is precisely that it does not become didactic. The painting is strange, colorful, humorous, theatrical, and mysterious. Its ecological possibilities emerge through its structure rather than through an explicit message. This distinction is important. The strongest contemporary art does not always tell viewers what political or environmental conclusion to reach. It can instead reorganize perception so that familiar categories become unstable. Juntado’s achievement lies in making us look at trees as characters, animals as companions, landscape as memory, and fantasy as a legitimate way of thinking.

The painting can also be understood through the contemporary return to questions of belonging and place. In rapidly changing cities and communities, people increasingly experience a tension between physical environments and remembered environments. A place can remain geographically identifiable while becoming culturally or emotionally different. Juntado’s landscape seems to exist somewhere between actual geography and remembered place. It is not a map of a specific location but an imaginative territory assembled from fragments of experience. The result is a kind of psychological geography, where the landscape represents not simply where one is but what one remembers, fears, imagines, and carries internally.

This is perhaps why the title There Is Something in the Air is so effective. It does not announce a subject. It announces a suspicion. Something is happening, but it cannot yet be fully named. That structure of uncertainty is deeply contemporary. We live surrounded by information, images, warnings, predictions, algorithms, environmental indicators, political crises, and technological transformations, yet the accumulation of information does not necessarily produce clarity. Sometimes it produces precisely the opposite: a pervasive sensation that something has changed before we can identify exactly what has changed. Juntado translates that sensation into visual form.

The painting ultimately becomes most compelling when understood as a meditation on uncertainty itself. Its surrealism does not escape reality; it gives reality another vocabulary. The moon, trees, birds, animals, human figure, apple, and saturated landscape become instruments through which the artist explores experiences that ordinary realism might struggle to visualize. Memory is not realistic. Myth is not realistic. Anxiety is not realistic. Dreams are not realistic. Yet all of them can profoundly shape how people understand the world. Juntado recognizes this and builds a visual environment in which these different registers can coexist.

For this reason, There Is Something in the Air feels more relevant than its fantastical appearance might initially suggest. It speaks to a moment when artists are increasingly asked to think about ecology, technology, memory, identity, and the future while still negotiating the enduring human need for stories. Juntado does not answer these questions directly. Instead, he constructs a world in which the questions can remain open. His trees watch, his animals gather, his celestial bodies illuminate the scene, and his human figure remains enclosed within a creature that is simultaneously strange and protective. Everything appears connected, but the nature of that connection remains uncertain.

That uncertainty is not a weakness. It is the painting’s most productive condition. The work suggests that perhaps the most important things are not always the things we can immediately explain. Sometimes art begins precisely with the sensation that something is present before language has arrived to name it. In Juntado’s painting, that sensation becomes color, creature, landscape, memory, and myth. There really is something in the air, but the achievement of the work is that it allows the viewer to decide whether that something is ecological anxiety, ancestral memory, childhood imagination, cultural mythology, psychological unease, or simply the persistent human desire to believe that the world contains more than what can be immediately seen.

[This essay is part of a series on Hánag: Emergent Perspectives, curated by Elvert Bañares, an exhibition that brings together visual art, photography, fashion, furniture design, film, and new media, offering new ways of seeing and experiencing Iloilo.]

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Noel Galon de Leon is a professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas. His poems have been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He serves as Secretary and a member of the NCLA Executive Council of the NCCA.