Romeo Cortez Jr. and his art pieces at Hiyas Exhibition | Photo by Troi Santos
On the walls of the Philippine Center Gallery in Manhattan, the brilliance of a collective shines under the name Hiyas. From August 18 to 29, 2025, the space becomes a vessel of memory, identity, and continuity, carrying the voices of Filipino artists across oceans. Among these voices is Romeo “Ronald” Ratio Cortez Jr., whose quiet intensity and devotion to detail have transformed pastel into testimony.
Romeo’s journey begins far from New York’s Fifth Avenue, in a modest home in the Philippines, where art was born not from abundance but from ingenuity. His first canvases were discarded brown paper bags from his mother’s dressmaking work. On them, he sketched the world as he felt it, fish, fruits, faces, fleeting moments, shaping a language of images that spoke where words could not. What began as whimsy for his mother’s clients became, over time, a compass pointing him toward an identity inseparable from art.
The boy who once drew to fill silence grew into the artist who found a voice in silence. His lines matured, his patience deepened, and his realism sharpened into something more than craft.
At the Hiyas exhibition, Cortez’s works stand as meditations on both abundance and fragility. One canvas bursts with tropical still life, fish, fruits, and seashells arrayed against a vibrant backdrop, each object rendered with weight and history. It is not a market scene for the eye alone; it is an archive of Filipino domestic ritual, of kitchens humming with preparation, of feasts anchored in memory.
Beside it, the marbles in a glass jar roll into another story. Their translucence, shadows, and reflections suggest not only a child’s game but the persistence of innocence even in adulthood. To capture glass, reflection, and gravity in pastel is to test the limits of the medium, and Cortez achieves it with clarity that borders on reverence.
These works are not opposites; they are extensions of one sensibility. They ask the viewer to pause, to remember, to see ordinary objects as extraordinary vessels of time.
Romeo’s first encounter with the Philippine Center Gallery came in 2003, when he was invited to join a group exhibition of Lucbanin artists. That moment marked a crossing, the boy who once stood in bookstores studying art he could not afford was now standing before international audiences. To exhibit in New York was not only a personal triumph but also a cultural affirmation that Filipino realism could hold its ground among the world’s established traditions.
Now, more than two decades later, he returns to the same gallery under Hiyas, this time with a career adorned by awards from pastel societies, exhibitions across continents, and membership in prestigious circles like the Pastel Society of America and the Philippine Pastel Artists. What anchors him, however, remains the same: the refusal to separate technique from sincerity.
The word Hiyas means jewel, and the exhibition gathers artists who embody different facets of Filipino creativity: Antonio Afablé, Ann Constantino Beck, Raynante Carandang, Florentino “Jun” Impas, Kublai Millan, Celso and Fe Pepito, Marcelino Rodriguez, Cesea De Los Santos III, and Jik Villanueva. Together they form a constellation of perspectives, each piece distinct yet bound by a shared cultural gravity.
Cortez’s contribution to this constellation gleams with its own clarity, the humility of still life elevated to permanence. His fish and fruit works are reminders of sustenance and survival, his marbles are not toys but prisms through which memory refracts.
Romeo’s walls of recognition are lined with awards, the Saunter and Margulies Memorial Award from HVAAI in 2025, Best in Show at juried pastel exhibitions, and distinctions across societies in America and the Philippines. But what endures is not the medal or plaque, it is the insistence that art must remain honest.
To stand before his works is to sense the continuity of a boy drawing on brown paper bags, a man carrying sketchbooks through museums, and an artist who has chosen passion over certainty.
In this gathering of jewels, Romeo’s work gleams with the patient fire of a man who has spent a lifetime turning ordinary objects into extraordinary truth.
