MAIA CRUZ PALILEO: SATOR ROTAS

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present SATOR ROTAS, its first exhibition of new work by Maia Cruz Palileo.

March 13 – April 26, 2025

Palileo looks at their own Filipino heritage to better understand the routes by which their family arrived in the United States, but also as a way of entering into deeper communication with their own psychological and imaginative responses to the contemporary world. In each phase of Palileo’s work, they give shape to otherwise invisible forces that animate landscapes, drive historical change, and enrich—and complicate—human lives.

SATOR ROTAS features work Palileo has made since their visit to the Philippines at the beginning of 2024, when they were able to have firsthand experiences of environments that, as someone born in the US, they had predominantly encountered through archival documentation and secondhand family accounts. A whole new set of sense impressions has therefore transformed the raw material available to them on both conscious and unconscious levels, lending increased physicality to a practice already notable for its attunement to the sculptural qualities of paint.

Such impressions are not limited, however, to the visual or even the tactile. They also include more intuitive perceptions that arose when Palileo was able to connect myths, legends, and folklore shared by their family with the natural landscapes of the Philippines, resulting in an expanded, multi-dimensional sense of place. Several paintings are informed by time spent around Mount Banahaw, a slumbering volcano long considered a holy pilgrimage site in the Philippines. Palileo renders images of dense forest scenes, root systems, and branching forms of trees, providing opportunities for intricate layering and the creation of suggestive, mystery-laden openings where the unruliness of life bursts forth, seemingly of its own accord.

The exhibition’s palindromic title draws attention to ideas of reflection and mirroring that appear throughout the works on view.