PR- Kat Malazarte’s solo exhibition| ‘Fiat Lux’| March 18, 2017 ( Saturday)| 6:00PM

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When you look back on your life, what do you see? Do you see a reflection of your appearance, or the beauty of your heart? Do you see the twisted path you tread, or the wonder of your life’s journey? Do you see the brokenness of your spirit, or the strength of your soul?

In her existential musings on the pain and beauty in suffering, 21-year-old artist Kat Malazarte explores the deepest and most spiritual questions culled from life, putting to canvas portraits that reveal her deep well of realizations after countless hours observing people in various states of emotion as well as her own introspection on her own life. For her, her portraits are not painted just to be displayed, nor just to be felt, but to allow the soul to see through the most painful moments that transcend and change humanity and her-story, beautifully.

The Iloilo-based artist uses light and shade to truthfully portray the emotions of her subject, manipulating them to communicate the reality and realness of their vulnerability. Using strong directional light, she lifts anatomical details and features that draw attention to the human form, emphasizing their curves, body lines and muscles, accentuated with flowy and other-worldly creases and drapes, moved and governed by the laws of gravity. But more than that, she uses the light to allow the viewer to see souls instead of bodies – a visual appeal to let go of who they were to become who they are meant to be.

Her collection of eight (8) paintings deftly expresses that life is half-dark and half-lit – that the journey of life may be littered with moments of pain and suffering, but is made beautiful and relevant by how one’s own light is used to recognize and turn these moments of great despair into times of great repair. In the shadows of her portraits, she invites viewers to acknowledge the feelings of loneliness and defeat, of despair and hopelessness; and in the presence of light, the realization that the suffering of the inevitable pain becomes optional, and from suffering, a strong soul emerges, beautifully scarred.

The greatest power of holding and owning one’s light is for one to see that to suffer beautifully is a perspective, and to live life faithfully is a power of choosing and determining. Because the painful truth is that the most beautiful people have been broken the hardest, making their brokenness a gift.

Kat, who also expresses herself through poetry, superbly captures her own acknowledgment of beauty in suffering:

To question the questions already been answered, Is like fooling a fooled who’s already been told, If you begin to breathe, Then shall you start to live, But if you try to lie, Then you prepare to die.

To the woman and the man birthed and mothered by a woman, may your own moment of the fiat lux of eternity come to you to replace your brokenness with beauty. And in celebration of the National Women’s Month, let there be light, for pain to pass and beauty to remain.