Mga Santong ’Di Naging Tayo / The Saints We Never Became

August Lyle Espino

In his latest exhibition, Mga Santong ’Di Naging Tayo / The Saints We Never Became, August Lyle Espino unveils an abstraction that does not entirely dissolve the visible world, turning it into a vessel for story, a carrier of resonances from ordinary life. His canvases expand into terrains of struggle and spirit, staging a contemplation on the unsung labor of fathers, artists, workers, and martyrs—figures whose efforts resemble a form of spiritual upheaval, a striving toward sanctity. Yet their names, as the artist reminds us, are often unwritten in history, swept away by flood, time, or silence.

Espino’s paintings surge with ribbons and commotions of paint: upheavals, ascents, and transformations captured in their restless motion. These gestures, coiling upward, resolve into bodies marked by strength and vigor, as though energy itself were breaking free from flesh. Amid these unfurling forces emerge the signs of civilization—crosses, thresholds, whorls of attention—suggesting portals into another order of meaning.

These stirrings may also be indicative of how two people—in a friendship, in a romantic relationship—aspire for holiness, a revelation of pure essences to each other. Given outside challenges and influences, this pursuit encounters roadblocks and frustrations, no matter the singularity of the philosophy that has nurtured it. Failed saints, as the title points out, they become, ever-reaching to the ideal as dissipation and atrophy catch up with them.

At times, a discernible landscape surfaces: a scatter of forms bristling against the hostility of nature, intimations of dwellings or structures carved out of peril. To wrest order from chaos requires Herculean effort; here, muscle and might are summoned in the face of forces that test and fray human labor. But the greater trial, Espino suggests, is against powers of our own making—institutions and authorities that curtail, contain, and demand survival against their weight. In these struggles, what remains is a clinging to filaments of faith, the fragile thread that binds body to soul.

These canvases become Espino’s own resistance, his refusal to capitulate. His brushstrokes multiply, proliferate, spill past the borders of containment. The painter insists that the tremendous exertion that bears us to the edge of sainthood, even if unnamed or uncanonized, is not futile. For it is in the very act of labor, in the unrecorded strength of lives lived against silence, that sanctity dwells—if not conferred, then embodied.

-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana