Tina Periquet: From interior design to painting
An interior designer by profession, Tina Periquet is inconspicuously but impressively hammering her own place as one of the august Filipino realist painters today.
Last November, she held her second solo exhibit at the Artifact Projects in New York City featuring works of scenes she encountered in the United States and Europe.
Periquet studied at the prestigious Art Students League under the tutelage of American master painters Thomas Torak and Costa Vavagiakis.
Locally, she trained under Filipino masters Romulo Galicano and Edgardo Lantin as well as Romeo Ballada, Gig de Pio Sr., and Junn Roca.
An interior designer and the wife of architect Dominic Galicia, Periquet did the interiors of posh residential buildings in Manila as well as residential spaces in Hong Kong, London, New York, and Vancouver, and the National Museum of Natural History.
It was in 2017 that she accidentally discovered painting through the Saturday group of known Filipino artists.
That was actually intended for her daughter, but perhaps the stars aligned for her to pick up the brush and start learning how to paint, where she progressed rapidly.
Expressing light
Lantin prodded her to study art and art-making because he saw in her the potential, the talent.
She took that advice and studied at the aforementioned school, learning the rudiments of portraiture, anatomic painting, composition, and other aspects of art and art-making.
At the Art Students League which she said is “living and breathing art,” she learned about the technicalities, strategies, and approaches in painting as well as how light illuminates a subject.
As a lighting designer, she knows how light works, how to express light in architecture, the very concept she applies to her works of art.
“I could always draw but painting is different,” she said, adding that the experience of studying art transported her to another dimension, just like a religious experience, a discovery of sorts. She began painting subjects with a sense of positivity that is encouraging and nurturing.
In 2019, she held her first solo show, “At the Solstice” at the Legacy Art Gallery in Makati through Silverio, who likewise noted her talent.
Visual delights
Periquet’s work encompasses varied subjects including still life, portraiture, nudes, street scenes, animals, and landscapes, in oil.
She tends to paint things that are more nuanced and what she describes as “visual delights,” or something that resonates with her.
She is drawn to things that are not normally seen or appreciated. It is not about the brilliant sky or the sunrise or sunset, but “about finding beauty in the natural world.” Her works are in between, showing the natural lighting of a scene, or the depth of the composition.
Periquet’s oeuvres reflect the beauty in muteness. The paintings impart a message that every person has a best side.
Her preferred medium is oil, which she said lets her “build depth through layering and refining over long periods of time.” It likewise allows her “to develop an idea as it takes shape on the canvas.”
In a work, Periquet does not only paint a scene she sees but executes it together with the experience felt during that moment.
She paints to express, “not painting for other people to buy,” and describes her works as reflections of things seen at one moment with the product capturing her own point of view.
For her, “art is not about finding beauty, it’s about making it.”
So far, Periquet has participated in a number of group shows in the Philippines and art fairs in France and the United States.
She won honorable mention in the landscape contest of the California-based Art Show International Gallery in 2022 and won the art competition of the Maryland-based Contemporary Art Gallery Online at the height of pandemic.
She has also garnered awards as an interior designer, notably the Outstanding Interior Designer of the Year by the Philippine Regulation Commission in 2016.
Periquet is a member of the Visual Artists Guild of Silverio and company, and of the Philippine Institute of Interior Design. She has degrees in interior design and English literature from the Assumption College, and master’s degrees in business administration and interior design from the Ateneo School of Business and Pratt Institute, New York, respectively.
Apart from her stint at the Art Students League and workshops with known Filipino artists, she also studied Architectural Imagination at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and graphic design fundamentals at the California Institute of the Arts.
Art critic Cid Reyes said Periquet “brings to bear the discipline essential to interior space, affecting form, space, light, and shadow. Her emerging persona in design and art commingles a dose of theatrical drama and a disciplined measure of restraint and judiciousness.”
Indeed, it is that control and shrewdness that make her art engaging and captivating. The beauty out of an ordinary scene is well presented and the attraction locked.
