Inner Instinct presents the works of Iloilo-born painter Cezar Arro, a visual artist known for his expressionistic depictions of human faces. Throughout a career spanning over two decades, Arro has explored the expressive potential of the portrait through various artistic strategies.

In Inner Instinct, Arro’s eleventh solo exhibition, the artist continues this exploration albeit, as the title indicates, with an orientation that leans more towards the act of drawing out rather than layering over. Each work presented in this show revolves around the process of bringing a subject’s internal and intangible forces—their mental, emotional, and psychological states, their drives, desires, thoughts, and passions—to the fore. As Arro visualizes impulses and gives form to the instinctual, a surfacing of depths takes place in which the borders between background and foreground evaporate, allowing the two to collapse into a single two-dimensional plane, often manifesting as flat surfaces evocative of walls caked with dense graffiti-like scrawls from which a phantasmic facial feature or visage emerges.

On these planes, Arro translates expressions in ways that exceed, transgress, and transcend the abilities of the human face—its physical, bodily, or muscular limits. Once described as a “‘destroyer’ of human faces,” Arro enacts a “dis-figurement,” or an enhancement of figuration and representation, by incorporating or infusing into this framework elements from disparate image-making modes like abstraction and stylization. While pigments are continued to be utilized for strokes that, when taken as a whole, resemble a smile or a forlorn glance, Arro further complicates this method by including fragments and impressions of symbolic, metaphorical, or allegorical images and motifs, by conveying the lyrical qualities of color and material properties of paint, its thickness and finish, and by indexing the physicality of artmaking through painterly gestures, all of which lead to a composite picture of a much richer expression