ManilART 2025: The Invisible Lines That Keep Philippine Art Alive

The fair has become a living diagram of Philippine art itself.

At the SMX Aura Convention Center, ManilART 2025, held October 15 to 19, opened its doors to a familiar rhythm. The hum of collectors, the quiet intensity of artists, the slow drift of people moving from booth to booth, eyes adjusting to color and light. 

Now on its 17th year, the country’s longest-running national art fair once again lived up to its theme, “Across Forms, Beyond Borders.”

The fair has grown beyond its role as a marketplace. It’s become a living diagram of Philippine art itself—expansive, contradictory, and driven by countless personal stories that intersect in unpredictable ways. Nowhere was this clearer than in the works of two artists who stood on opposite ends of the spectrum yet seemed to echo one another: Art Lozano, Ombok Villamor, and Danny Rayos del Sol.

The ground up

At Booth E3, Art Lozano’s Pugad ni Art Studio showcased a collection of works not by one artist, but by many, a testament to art as a shared act. The pieces varied in style and subject, bound together less by aesthetic and more by spirit.

“When I first started, I got rejected by the Baguio Arts Guild and Tam-awan,” Lozano said. “I didn’t know enough yet. I needed more guidance. This became the spark to what would eventually become Pugad Ni Art.”

The rejection that might have closed one path instead opened another. Pugad ni Art became a refuge for emerging artists, a space where mentorship replaced hierarchy. At ManilART, their booth was both exhibition and ecosystem: proof that community is itself a medium, no less expressive than paint or canvas.

Art Lozano
Instagram: @art.lozano_
Facebook / Studio: Pugad ni Art Studio
Email (inquiries): pugadniart.artistcommunity@gmail.com
Contact Number: +63 922-890-0587 

The view from the summit

A few steps away, Ombok Villamor’s Pristine Summits offered a different kind of silence. Known for his sea-inspired abstractions—fluid, organic, and tidal—Villamor’s new works were stripped down to their essence. Just lines. Lines that rise and dip, stretch and breathe, like the faint rhythm of thought.

If Lozano’s art was born of the collective, Villamor’s felt like meditation—a distillation of decades of searching. “The bloodline of art will always be the collectors,” he said. “Without blood, there would be no life.”

Villamor folded gratitude and realism into one. His Pristine Summits seemed to honor not just creation, but the unseen network that keeps creation alive: patrons, collectors, and the quiet believers who keep the current flowing.

Ombok Villamor
Instagram: @artgalleryofomvi
Website: OMVI Art Gallery
Contact Number: +63 917-322-6833 / +63 977-671-8304 (Viber / WhatsApp)
Gallery: 2nd Flr, Vista Mall, Sta. Rosa, Laguna 

Danny Rayos del Sol and the Art of Reinvention

Then there was Danny Rayos del Sol, whose practice stands at the crossroads of craft, healing, and personal rebirth. Known as the country’s only ostrich eggshell artist, his intricate carved forms gleamed under the gallery lights, fragile yet unyielding, their surfaces transformed into luminous sculptures.

“I was battling depression and was in a really bad place in my life when art found me,” he recalled. “Someone gave me several ostrich eggshells… I did some research, tried my hand at it, and when a friend asked me to make a collection for her showcase… they sold out immediately. Then and there I found my calling.”

From that dark moment grew a career that now spans curation, mentorship, and advocacy. His presence at ManilART wasn’t just as an artist but as part of the fair’s creative DNA, proof that reinvention, like art itself, is never finished.

Danny Rayos del Sol
Facebook: Rayos del Sol Art
Gallery: Galerie du Soleil MNL (9D Bagong Calsada St., Taguig City) 
Contact Number: +63 0919 991-8765 

Between artist and audience

Lozano, Villamor, and Rayos could not be more different: one builds nests, the other draws peaks, and for another it is the redemptive spark between pain and purpose. Yet all are engaged in the same act of connection. Lozano reaches outward, nurturing community; Villamor and Rayos look inward, tracing continuity. One speaks of beginnings, the others of endurance.

And that, perhaps, is what ManilART 2025 managed to capture this year. Not merely the diversity of forms, but the shared pulse beneath them. Art in the Philippines, the fair seemed to suggest, survives not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s familial. It’s built on conversation… between artist and collector, mentor and apprentice, self and society.

Beyond borders

In the end, ManilART 2025 wasn’t just a convention; it was a reminder of how art circulates through lives—as generosity, as persistence, as faith. For every painting sold or photographed, there were stories like Lozano’s and Villamor’s quietly anchoring the room, insisting that creation is never solitary.

And when the lights dimmed at SMX Aura, what lingered wasn’t a single image or installation, but a realization: the real masterpiece of ManilART is connection itself—the invisible line that runs between artist and audience, sustaining them both.

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