Painter Celeste Lecaroz returns with “Many Marias: Callas by Lecaroz,” a new cycle of five paintings and four pen-and-ink drawings on the operatic soprano Maria Callas, opening May 15 at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium Lobby, RCBC Tower, Makati. The exhibition runs through May 30 in conjunction with the Philippine Opera Company’s production of Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning play Master Class, with Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo in the title role.
“Many Marias” is Lecaroz’s 11th solo exhibition and her first since “Redux” (Galerie Anna, 2023). The two-year interval marks the longest gap between solo shows in the painter’s career, during which she trained as a long-distance open-water swimmer and worked on private commissions. The nine works of “Many Marias” are her first new paintings shown publicly to comprise a solo exhibit since 2024.
The exhibition’s central canvas divides Maria Callas’s face down the bridge of the nose: chromatic acrylic on one side, grayscale tonal drawing on the other, the seam between them refusing the synthesis the form usually demands. A second structural canvas embeds a band of grayscale eyes — quoted from the historical Callas’s photographic record — across a fully chromatic body. The cycle’s largest work, a four-by-five-foot canvas painted last, integrates both registers: the duality absorbed into the modeling of the face itself, one eye direct, one eye withdrawn.
The monograph essay, drawing on NVM Gonzalez’s distinction between the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of art, frames “Many Marias” as the show in which “the diachronic and synchronic axes meet on a single face, refuse to merge, and produce — across nine works in two media — a Maria who is finally permitted to be many at once.”
Lecaroz works in the Spontanrealismus tradition associated with the Austrian painter Voka, developing a chromatic-figurative idiom across nearly a decade of solo and group exhibitions. Her previous shows include “Redux” and “Repetitio,” both of which engaged the work of National Artist Fernando Amorsolo through the chromatic vocabulary she has made central to her practice. Her viral 2020 portrait of Kobe Bryant and her portraits of Philippine presidents Manuel Quezon and Corazon Aquino remain in the public domain. Her paintings have appeared on the covers of several San Anselmo Press titles, including the Penguin Classics translation of Lope K. Santos’s Banaag at Sikat and Servant Leader: Leni Robredo.
The exhibition’s accompanying monograph, published by San Anselmo Press, includes a poem by Jim Pascual Agustin, plates of all nine works, and the catalogue essay. The Philippine Opera Company has described the pairing as “the stage meets the canvas in one extraordinary celebration of art.”
“Many Marias: Callas by Lecaroz” opened on May 15, 2026, and runs through May 30 at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium Lobby, RCBC Tower, Ayala Avenue corner Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue, Makati City.
For exhibition inquiries and to acquire the monograph, contact San Anselmo Publications, Inc. through its Facebook page. For Master Class tickets, call 0917-645-2946 or visit www.ticket2me.net.
