STATEMENT
Jon Gesalaga
My work begins where reality fractures and becomes permeable—where matter stops behaving as a surface and starts revealing its internal tension. I am not interested in depicting the visible, but in exposing the moment in which the visible loses its stability and another layer of meaning pushes through.
This shift is neither symbolic nor abstract: it is structural. It emerges when the body dissolves, when identity thins out, when what we call “self” stops being central and becomes a membrane for something larger. My images inhabit that threshold. They do not illustrate it; they operate inside it.
My practice is built on a simple premise: the world is not coherent. Coherence is a narrative constructed after the fact. What interests me is the instant before that narrative closes. The interval in which matter, gesture and consciousness still exist in a state of negotiation.
In that uncertainty, the sacred appears not as doctrine, not as nostalgia, but as a pressure. A force that insists. A residue of revelation that persists even in a secular age. I explore this insistence through bodies that crack, dissolve, overflow, or become mineral, fluid, or translucent. These transformations are not metaphors. They are experiments: ways of showing how the human form continues to host tensions that exceed it.
I work with photography, AI-assisted generation and digital reconstruction as one continuous process. The goal is not realism, but intensity: to build images that feel inevitable, as if they had always existed in a latent state and were simply waiting to be revealed.
My intention is not to offer answers, but to create a space where perception expands for a moment—where the viewer experiences that brief death of the self that precedes clarity.
What is left afterwards is not certainty, but alignment: the sensation that something has shifted, silently, beneath the surface.
