Symphony of Life 18, Mixed Media, 18 x 24 | Contributed Photo
On Fifth Avenue, beneath the grid of Manhattan steel and glass, the Philippine Center Gallery opens its doors to HIYAS. This exhibition feels like a constellation, eleven artists, each distinct, yet orbiting the same cultural sun. Among them is Antonio Afable Jr., with his luminous abstractions, a series he calls Symphony of Life.
Afable’s new works, Symphony of Life 16, 17, and 18, are painted on layered acrylic sheets that catch light the way stained glass catches prayer. He applies color in bold, translucent strokes, lemon yellows, pastel pinks, deep violets, and sudden shocks of vermilion. These are not landscapes; they echo the horizon, sunrise, sea, earth, and sky, distilled into pure sensation.
In Symphony of Life 18, a sun-like orb hovers above a band of radiant yellow, evoking both dawn and memory. Symphony of Life 17 offers lighter pastels, air, breath, release, broken by a single streak of red, a heartbeat against calm. Symphony of Life 16, darker and more contemplative, layers lavender and brown, as if grappling with thresholds. Seen together, they feel like movements in a symphony, an overture, an interlude, a reckoning.
Afable, who studied Fine Arts at the University of Santo Tomas and later migrated to Canada, has long balanced discipline with improvisation. His career spans Rome, Toronto, Paris, and countless juried exhibitions in Ontario. Plein air competitions shaped his early years; today, abstraction is his chosen language. He calls this “Wall Art,” art that shifts with light, mood, and the eye of the beholder.
The Philippine Center on Fifth Avenue is more than a gallery. It is a symbolic front door of the Filipino community in New York, a site where cultures meet. To place Afable’s Symphony of Life here is to allow his shifting acrylic layers to catch both the gallery’s light and the ambient glow of Manhattan. The works behave like mirrors of migration, altered by context, refracted by time zones, never still.
The exhibition title, HIYAS, means “jewel,” and each artist shines as a distinct facet of a larger cultural vein. Afable’s abstractions provide luminosity as identity. Color becomes diaspora, transparency becomes resilience, and rhythm becomes memory. His canvases are not just decorative walls; they are atmospheres that expand Filipino visual culture into universal form.
Alongside Afable’s glowing symphonies are the works of Ann Constantino Beck, Raynante Carandang, Romeo Cortez Jr., Florentino “Jun” Impas, Kublai Millan, Celso Pepito, Fe Pepito, Marcelino Rodriguez, Cesear de los Santos III, and Jik Villanueva. Each contributes a fragment of Philippine artistry, from myth-making and realism to conceptual gestures and spiritual narrative. Together, they demonstrate that Filipino identity in art is not a single path; it is a spectrum of evolving approaches.
Curated by Elba S. Cruz and accompanied by a performance from Kinding Sindaw, HIYAS is more than an exhibition. It is a living proof that Filipino art abroad continues to grow luminous, layered, and alive. Afable’s Symphony of Life rests at the heart of this constellation, shimmering in rhythm with the jewel-like presence of HIYAS.
