Originally a Psychology graduate specializing in Special Education, Jel Suarez is a formidable newcomer
in the contemporary scene; having been shortlisted at this year’s Ateneo Art Awards after only four years
as an exhibiting artist. Jel has mounted one solo exhibition a year at West Gallery, Underground Gallery,
and twice at Vinyl on Vinyl; participated in art fairs in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore;
and joined 16 group exhibitions. Purely a collage artist, Jel clips from narrative-based materials like books, catalogues, and archives, extracting fragments in a fixed, almost instinctual process, and rearranges them in landscape-like rhythmic configurations. Her aesthetic perspective sees the details of images not as part of its whole, but as potentially part of something more overarchingly complex. The end result resembles poetic cairns whose twofold intervention – first created and printed, then cutout and reconfigured – symbolically reveals a fractured, yet beautifully connected past.