The affinity between landscapes and emotions is a link broadly explored across art history. For centuries, artists have fashioned mountains, fields, and seas as the loci of human experience. In skies, waves, and trees, we witness humanity—its turbulence, calm, and possibility—natural forms that become mirrors through which inner life is externalized and made legible.
It is from this tradition that Dan Macapugay’s painterly practice with landscape emerges. His past works have explored the subject in various configurations: as backdrops to human narratives, as terrains that measure our contemplative ranges, among others. In all these, the generative factor is the motif’s emotive latitude. For the artist, landscapes are vistas shaped by contradiction. They are silent yet honest. Truthful yet never literal. Expansive yet intimate.
In the present collection, trees form Macapugay’s primary visual device. Like the rest of his subjects, they emerge as sites of contrast, representing both stability and change, firmly rooted yet attuned to water, light, and time. Central to this is the artist’s use of a ground-level perspective, which lends the landscapes a more immersive tenor. Rather than observing them from a distance, he depicts them as if we are moving right through them—finding our own paths and meanings, among the trees. In this journey, Macapugay invites us to seek our own meanings, whether growth, clarity, or peace, within our inner terrains.
Text by Chez Santiago
