Demi Padua’s signature collaged portraits reflect an artist with just as diverse a story.

Words Mara Fabella
Photography Jovel Lorenzo
November 9, 2023

This is an excerpt from Art+ Magazine Issue 87. To read the full story, get the latest issue available on collectibles by artplus, Shopee, and on select stores of National Bookstore and Fully Booked.

There are many things that draw one’s eye to a Demi Padua artwork. Multiple elements immediately grab the viewer’s attention. Perhaps the most notable is the form of the portrait itself. Faces take up the entire breadth of his canvases. He deftly uses them as a visual anchor to fuse both abstract and figurative elements with a sense of play. Padua turns his faces into metaphorical blank canvases reminiscent of face morphing softwares. Eyes, mouths, and whole identities are rearranged, remolded, and elevated into another visual plane entirely through the artist’s painterly interventions. These new faces are made both indecipherable and a lingering curiosity at the same time. Unknowable as they may be, they spark our desire to try to recognize.

Padua’s paintings are known for having a distinctly contrasting color palette. Across his canvases, muted neutrals work both with and against sections of dynamic hues. These hues usually consist of sky blues, earthy ochres, fleshy pinks, and more. For Padua, this dichotomy represents possibility. “We are free to color our lives to fit who we really are.” Both the lack and abundance of color allows viewers to project their interpretations onto each canvas. However instinctive as it may seem, Padua still remains intentional with his distribution of color. His faces are drained of hue, while all the other adornments – a bow, a geometric prism, a lively patch of texture – are colored with a Pop Art sensibility. More than the striking visual impact, the artist taps into our natural penchant for adornment. It may be seen to some extent as a kind of vandalism. Yet Padua’s meticulous compositions suggest an accentuation of the features we often forget carry an inherent beauty.

The artist’s painterly skills are evident in the way he deftly weaves together textures. His faces, rendered in hyperrealism, bear a smooth, photographic finish. This is contrasted with his use of heavily textured impasto or layered swirls of paint scattered chaotically across his canvas. One might dismiss this stylistic manner as mere aesthetic fancy. Yet while painting, it remains clear that Padua is, in all aspects, meticulous. Rather than conflicting, both styles complement each other, emphasizing the other’s qualities. The polished finish of each underpainting brings out the coarse terrain of his impasto, while these patches appear to float above the untouchable veneer of each portrait. Padua’s frenetic textures are as much a case of drawing the eye in as his photographic realism. Together, these visual planes never fully cohere, while at the same time, aligning as if forming a masked facade, both revealing and concealing identity.

Padua’s mixed-media sculptures highlight the surreal nature of his figures. In his solo show Eye-Con (2018) at Art for Space Gallery, he exhibited his toy sculptures alongside his paintings, playfully arranged across the gallery as if they had crawled out of his canvases. Padua’s toy art and mixed media works accentuate in 3D his artistry at integrating layers into a seamless whole—a process he describes as a “transfiguration.” Working in 3D presents more of a physical challenge than in painting, the artist shares. Yet he finds both modes of art are able to play with his viewer’s gaze in their own unique ways, and thus finds enjoyment in both. “I am a whole package artist, meaning I am not only into painting or into mixed media/sculpture…whatever I do is a work of art.”

Written by Mara Fabella
Photography Jovel Lorenzo
Cover Art & Creative Direction Kim Albalate
Stylist Bryan Laroza
Shoot Coordination Coleen Wong