Kiko Capile | Mad Season

The contradictions that pervade the senses never fail to draw our attention: the familiar and the strange; agony and ecstasy; beauty and madness. In Kiko Capile’s works, they are ever-present. The condition and state of his subjects are continually caught between these transformations, and the artist who acts like their portraitist seems to capture the moment—and record them through his drawings.

Pushing further these contradictions are the serene and almost innocent, docile look in the characters that populate Capile’s 8th solo exhibition titled, ‘Mad Season.’ In his signature depiction—their skin begins to break away to reveal the grisly visions that could only be described as the stuff of nightmares. Hence, fascinating and sometimes relatable discrepancies of calmness and violence take place. As the sinuous veins, the spiky thorns, and the heart’s mutations push out from underneath, the characters do not portray terror but a completeness, as if to evoke that they have become the state of things and normalcy, and that everyone had turned into the fraught souls who would become adept at keeping things in the balance.

It is the central concept behind ‘Mad Season,’ to act as commentary to the uncertain times we are all caught in. It is an appeal to our own mutations—on how humans have ultimately learned to navigate a world that often feels chaotic and fragmented. It is our newfound identity: presenting faces and figures who have become psychologically overwhelmed by their surroundings. These are the portraits of entanglement —between our own desires of keeping in sync with the world despite the confusion.

The artist, Kiko Capile, is himself no stranger to these undulations and fragments. Born in Nueva Ecija, he was educated and trained in Quezon City, in an urban environment, before deciding to go back to his hometown for good. He started to learn how to draw at a very young age, and this had led him to work as a graphic artist for several years before finally deciding to pursue his own art.

He used to paint during his days as a Fine Arts student. But eventually became more interested in illustrating for comic books. This transition to pen and ink had allowed for him to draw more intricate and swarming details; it allowed him to develop a certain visual language that would soon find its way to his own social media platform, and eventually—to invitations for shows, to recognition by like-minded artists, to collectors, and to his first solo exhibition during the pandemic year.

There is a kind of parallelism here that can be compared to the idea of ‘seasons.’ For an artist who had his own periods and bouts with inactivity, with uncertainty, and finally in letting go and in letting art dictate his destiny.  His own art. Which later on, would take shape and form a kind of reflection of our own waking and dreaming states—-and the transformations that occur in between, and as the portrayal of our inner struggles.

/CLJ