Where the window is also a cage
What happens when a painting ceases to be merely a two-dimensional pictorial field and becomes an object in the round? Once it steps into three dimensions, it exists as both a painting and a relic—an artifact of an artifact. Imbued with conceptual weight, the work no longer merely offers an image to behold, but layers of meaning to navigate: a physical object that contains a narrative, poses a question, and becomes a grid through which one sees the world.
Such is the premise of Pope Bacay’s exhibition at Artinformal, aptly titled “What We Hold Sacred.” Bacay presents works that examine not only the structure, texture, and visual attributes of windows, but also use them to critique power, perception, and memory.
Framing our perspective
For Bacay, a frame is a structure that not only delineates a physical boundary but also serves as a metaphor for how society continually frames and reframes collective memory.
Consider his photorealistic rendering of the frame that houses Juan Luna’s “Spoliarium.” Bacay doesn’t paint Luna’s iconic masterpiece itself; instead, he isolates its physical container—the antique, heavy timber and metal chains that hold it. At the National Museum, these elements are practically invisible, visually subordinate to the emotionally charged drama of dead gladiators being dragged across the floor.
Bacay subverts the visual experience of the “Spoliarium” by excluding the painting itself, compelling the viewer to meditate entirely on the frame that houses a seminal work of Philippine national iconography and historical memory. In doing so, he does more than challenge our understanding of the past—he invites us to recognize our role in shaping how history is remembered, understood, and continually rewritten.
Everyday life in cages
Yet perhaps the most visually striking and conceptually rich dimension of Bacay’s exhibition lies in his “caged paintings.” Here, photorealistic renderings elevate everyday life: an electric post assumes the monumental posture of an obelisk; a cropped edge of a swimming pool takes on the gravity of a grand architectural edifice.
Bacay imprisons these scenes behind real cast-iron lattice grilles, transforming each canvas into a hybrid, paradoxical entity—a window and a cage.
As a sculptural object, the iron barrier enforces both a physical and psychological distance. The grilles prompt a question: What does it mean to see the world through a grid, to be held captive by the very frame through which we look?
Set against his broader body of work—which curiously navigates both the figurative and the non-figurative—Bacay’s imprisoned paintings ultimately function as psychological self-portraits. They invite us to wrestle with a fundamental tension: that a worldview, much like a window, serves simultaneously as our primary tool for comprehending the world and as the very frame that limits our understanding of it.
Merely looking, without truly seeing
Yet Bacay does not linger solely in visual ambiguities and free associations. He grounds his inquiry in the stark disparities of Filipino social life through deliberate site selection. With photorealistic precision, he paints a door inside Malacañang Palace, a facade of a sugar baron’s mansion, and the window of a derelict, forgotten house in Binondo—alongside, of course, the physical frame of Juan Luna’s Spoliarium.
In his own visual idiom, Bacay offers viewers a language—a network of signifiers—that allows for deeper meditation on how we ascribe meaning to the images and objects before us, and how merely looking, without truly seeing, can prevent us from recognizing the political realities hidden in plain sight.
“I want to give importance to vessels that give us a view. I am obsessed with views, openings, windows. In the case of landscape paintings, they provide an illusion of a window, an extended space. The landscape painting in my aunt’s house was perhaps what began my curiosity about windows and openings,” Bacay says.
“The idea behind the lattice grille is a physical translation of what I have been painting all these years. We live in a society where we see houses with such lattice grilles. I wanted to show this reality that our views are always obstructed, and we have learned to live with these obstructions.”
Read the full interview on lifestyle.inquirer.net.
