Faces grim and downcast gather in a crowd that mimic a landscape. No one is with anyone, but every one is with everyone. We’re All Alone Together is a work Icasas has started quite some time ago. Carrying on with the work over the lock down period, however, has allowed for a transformation of meaning: what once was a piece on being alone in a crowd, became a piece on being alone with the crowd. Somehow, a sense of kinship has been introduced. Icasas usually lets his works be, working around a general idea in mind, but leaving space for chance, necessary accidents, and organic sentiments to slither through.

Something To Believe In is an ode to those the artist holds with utmost importance: his faith and his family.

In this exhibition, Icasas’ landscapes is joined by two large portraits. One of his wife while pregnant with their child, The Plant Lady Never Goes Out, which he personally considers a family portrait, and Mother And Wild, where his wife pets their cat after breastfeeding their child. This is a nod to their domestic jest that the survival of every living thing in their home depends on the lady in the painting.

His portraits embody the general aesthetics of his landscapes except every stroke of paint to his subject is done with care, almost solemn and ritualistic compared to the free and seemingly boundless form his landscapes take.

Light has recently been slowly weaving itself through the lush hues and textures of Icasas’ landscape paintings, which usually references real places. Most of his works in Something To Believe In, however, are impressions, memories, and reveries. Perhaps it is for this reason that Icasas found it easier to inject himself and claim the identity of his landscapes. This can be experienced in his series of paintings of fenced lots entitled, Harang, to which he translates his desire to protect. In contrast to the portrait of his wife as a mother, these are his own portraits as a father.

His desire to protect those he holds dear, although instinctive, takes inspiration from the way his father always made him feel safe. Road To The Beach, more than a recollection of a moment, is a reliving of the trust a child towards a parent has, the kind when words of assurance are enough. Icasas recalls asking his father how much longer before their destination, then believing when told they were almost there even though the road he’s seeing says otherwise.

Faith is intuitive. Often, it is beyond the reach of proof. A cause, a belief system, a commitment, a promise – having something to believe in is having something to hope for, it is having something fight for.

– Marionne Contreras