There is much pain in the world, but not in this room
SOLO EXHIBITION BY
Paolo Icasas
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A dance, a moment, a breath
In soft currents of olive, moss, and beige, a lady sits—unbothered—beguiled into conversation with a bird of unknown origin. Perhaps an old friend, perhaps a stranger. A sight no one can trespass into, for theirs is an affinity beyond words. Worlds. Time. Even by time dilated by the weight of longing—for familiar companionship, for a touch, a tug, a yank, a twitch towards the opposite direction where death positions itself ever present—theirs is a bubble, a glitch, a knot in time until they part once more. This is Reunion (2025) placed directly in view as you pass the entryway— a warning, a plea—that in this room you are a bystander, an eavesdropper, a creature of the world, and this is not the world you know.
There Is Much Pain In The World, But Not In This Room is Paolo Icasas’ first exhibition with Vinyl On Vinyl Gallery, Makati. Limiting himself into the narrow space of the Video Room, he plays with the visual metaphor of the claustrophobic feeling of walls closing in—tightening like breath held too long, pressing against the chest—a slow collapse of air…
A slow collapse of space—the eventual consummation of the marriage of walls. From this, he redirects his attention to subtle reminders that hold himself together, that keep his bones in place. A man standing. Man Untouched By Gods (2025) depicts a boatman, a recurring image in Icasas’ works, a recurring symbol of human fortitude and divine surrender, in the same olive, moss, and beige, amidst a suggestive slather of unkind weather, in the middle of an ever-unknowable sea, to which a river yields without resistance—a soul unburdened, a bird in flight with nothing in claw, dissolving into light From One End Of The Earth To Another (2025).
“Dance me through the panic ‘til I’m gathered safely in.”
– Leonard Cohen (Dance me to the end of love, 1984)
Icasas borrows from a song. A dance, an enduring embrace, Dance Me Through The Panic (2025) is a stretching of a moment where time moves not with the ticking of clocks but with the rhythm of the hush between heartbeats. Lovers whose bodies settle and unfurl into the creases of each other, whose hands are held longer, whose gazes pulse with the silence of the space in between—where memories are born and longing finds a home, where the past lingers into a future uncertain. An embrace longer than the world allows, a rebellion against the constant pull of mortality, a taste of eternity when one gives oneself fully to love.
A soft prayer. A resignation to a much higher power. An offering of flowers—Sampaguita (2025)—small gestures of care and small acts of finding beauty in otherwise exhausting bouts of unease—these soften the edges of daily difficulties. From St. Josemaria Escriva’s The Way (1934),
“Great holiness consists in carrying out the little duties of each moment.”
This emphasizes the idea of self-peace not found in grand gestures but in the fulfillment of small responsibilities. Fear and worry are sponges, drinking deeply into each passing moment—moments that might have been lived—stealing time drop by drop. Eventually they swell into unforecasted storms of anxieties, leaving nothing on their path but heavy what-ifs and ghosts of a life that could have been fully lived. Yet an accumulation of small contentments wring fear and worry dry.
Amidst Endless Sunsets (2025)—the appreciation of daily life, whether struggle or the mundane—is expressed in Daily Thoughts Of Beauty (2025) and collected in a series of drawings on paper, pulled out from the artist’s numerous sketchbooks. The act of daily drawing is Icasas’ personal metronome for daily living—a rhythmic breathing, a rhythmic loosening of undefinable tensions that traverse the psychological and the physical. For the claustrophobic feeling of walls closing in—tightening like breath held too long, pressing against the chest—is diminished by…
An exhale.
‐ Marionne Contreras
