Miguel Paulo Borja
Published August 16, 2022
Filipino contemporary artist Miguel Paulo Borja’s opus is savage but never petty. A self-proclaimed “mark-maker, print-scraper, and brush-destroyer”, Borja’s gestural stroke work is a show-and-tell between worlds and spaces, time and perception, reality and delusion. In his wild lucid paintings, he creates images with an abiding sense of structure, balance, and compositional technique, seeking a style even further removed from mimesis and preoccupied with surface, color, and medium. Beginning with drawing and schema, Borja builds layers of abstraction to explore spirituality and duality through paint, sometimes eschewing narrative content or figuration.
The physical act of painting is of paramount importance to Borja’s approach and is apparent in his finished products. Each image, whether done in abstraction or figuration, displays their physical, psychological, and emotional responses to the world. His latest works moved towards a purer exploration of color and form, abandoning spatial convention. At times, Borja demonstrates this style of painting highlighting form, shape, and color with allusions to still life, rough lines, and ambiguous focal points.
Miguel Paulo Borja is a Filipino contemporary artist who graduated from the University of Santo Tomas (UST) with a degree in Fine Arts. Developing gestural brushwork based on permeation of paint through canvas, his style has evolved through the years with ghostly impressions left on his materials, he experiments with fragmentary shapes and the arbitrary. Borja has had numerous solo shows and participated in group shows in notable galleries such as Vinyl on Vinyl, Space Encounters, Nova Gallery, Mono8 Gallery, Art Central Hong Kong, in London, Taipei, Singapore, and Jakarta.
