Desire and the dirge of cicadas: Martine Velasco at The Crucible Gallery
Imagine a garden of flowers that bleed light, as the cicadas sing with the intent of non-existing. Nothing romantic about it at all, just something closer to hunger, older than longing, mainly “a heat between absence and revelation.”
These are the first thoughts that come to mind when looking at Martine Velasco’s artworks at her recent show at The Crucible Gallery in SM Megamall and having a chance to correspond with her. You see, Martine has always viewed desire as a deep, internal longing: less about romance, more about the psyche. Anne Carson’s writing, which describes desire as both pleasure and pain, resonated with her and matched the dualities already present in her work. The cicadas in her show symbolized this well: creatures that wait their whole lives for one final connection before dying. They also held personal meaning, tied to her childhood in her family’s garden. This became the root of the garden theme. Here, nature functions as an emotional mirror.
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“I’ve always resonated with the idea of desire as intense longing,” Velasco explains, “something that relates more to the psyche than acts of romance.” The show, spanning luminous oil paintings and assemblage sculpture, made that tension visible. It reframes desire not as connection, but as the space between.
Velasco’s thinking around the show began with Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, a book that defines desire through contradiction—pleasure and pain held in the same breath. That paradox is echoed in the exhibition’s dual figures, paired forms, and opposing materials. Her paintings are populated by ghostly cicadas and radiant silhouettes.
“Reframing it as a paradox triggered a recognition,” she explains. “My style always leaned into moments of duality and contrast. In the show it manifests through textural oppositions in the sculptures, and in the literal sense as twin or mirrored subjects in the paintings.”
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Cicadas figure prominently across the work as metaphors. “Cicadas essentially spend their whole lives in a state of primal desire,” Velasco says. “They die shortly after making a single fated connection.” For her, this mythological thread deepens the emotional core. “They were once humans who became so enchanted by the Muses that they forgot their basic needs and died. So they already had this symbolic weight, but they also meant something personal. I’d encounter them daily in my family’s garden.” That garden became the exhibition’s symbolic root: a site of fertility, transformation and mythic allegory. Nature, here, is both subject and storyteller.
Velasco’s relationship with materials furthers this narrative. The sculptures in “Desire Forms” are made from salvaged driftwood, kapok, stones, old textiles—objects with past lives. “I think there’s a special, unnamable quality to objects that have been exposed to certain energies,” she says. “Almost all the material came from my childhood home or our family’s provincial backyards. They’re imbued with the memory of that land and history.” The result is a quiet but resonant layering of time and meaning. “These materials have already been transformed by nature, and I’m giving them a second life as sculpture. I think these layers allow the objects to express a more authentic sense of memory.”
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Velasco treats memory not as content but as texture; visible in the wear of a wooden fragment or the patina of a found relic. In “Cat’s Cradle,” a deconstructed rosary winds around driftwood, a collision of Catholic and animist symbols. “I was drawn to pre-colonial mythologies and animist belief systems,” she says. “I’m interested in objects that were believed to hold divinity, like the agimat, and how that intersects with diaspora. That dual identity—growing up between Eastern and Western traditions—is embedded in my materials.”
Painting, for Velasco, is a more internal process. She began with cicada reference images, but let color take the lead. “I was thinking about chromatherapy,” she explains. “The idea that color can have healing effects. Pink and yellow kept coming up—they felt tied to emotional moments in my life. Color became a gateway to that emotional world.” In earlier works, the figures are more static. But as the series progressed, something shifted. “I became more invested in the idea of an energy exchange between the figures. These ‘lines of fate’ started taking over the image. It was a more literal way of portraying connection.”
Velasco’s compositions radiate with a kind of sacred geometry—lines that suggest spiritual circuitry, luminous thresholds, or the vesica piscis: an ancient almond-shaped intersection that recurs across the show. “There’s a kind of mandorla shape in both the paintings and sculptures,” she notes. “It became a visual language for the show without me realizing it at first.”
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Desire, in Velasco’s vision, exists within that shape: not in union, but in the space created by near-touch. “Desire can’t exist without separation,” she says. “It’s also made more beautiful by that separation. Beauty and decay operate on a similar axis.” The sculptures, especially, carry that tension. “Wishbone”features a suspended loop between stones and driftwood, fragile but charged. They’re like devotional objects whose meanings have been half-forgotten, half-reborn.
Despite its esoteric elements, “Desire Forms” is grounded in emotional urgency. “A lot of the work in this show seeks to counteract emotional numbness,” Velasco tells me. “It’s something I struggled with during its conception. So if it shakes my audience out of complacency, I’d feel like I accomplished something.”
There’s a clear sense of evolution. Velasco’s background—NYU B.F.A, years in fashion, then a return to Manila and sculpture—lends the work a cross-disciplinary confidence. “It was my first solo show,” she says. “I realized that my paintings and sculptures, while different, share common aesthetics and sensibilities. That gave me a more holistic view of my practice.” She’s planning to push further into sculpture next: “It’s playful and refreshing. I want to keep learning new skills and work in 3D more elegantly.”
The pieces in this recent exhibit trace movement through memory, matter, myth. “I hope my audience can find value in exploring their own emotional worlds,” Velasco concludes.
In Velasco’s world, desire isn’t a thing you hold; it’s the outline it leaves behind. The glow in the dark. The garden that, right after you’ve left, begins blooming.
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The Crucible Gallery is on the fourth floor of SM Megamall A. For information, follow Crucible Gallery on Facebook.
