Jon Cuyson The Sun Beneath, 2026
Curated by Mara Gladstone
Presented by Mahal Projects
The Sun Beneath painting series offers a glimpse into our forthcoming exhibition for the Philippine Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Here, the artist builds embossed surfaces with acrylic and lacquer, allowing negative impressions of mussels, singleuse straws, and everyday debris to settle into luminous fields of blue, green and violet. The glossy finish creates shifting depth, suggesting an undersea terrain where beauty and residue coexist.
These works developed alongside the paintings created for the Venice installation, Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig. The exhibition showcases the artist’s 30-year practice of sculptural paintings and films, and dives deep into the maritime imaginary to explore love, labor and diaspora through the places and people we call home.
If Sea of Love constructs a horizon, these paintings move beneath it. They function as small Memory Modules, compact surfaces where sediment, consumption, and marine life gather, extending the installation’s reflections on maritime ecologies and the traces that remain below visibility.
Jon Cuyson
Untitled (The Sun Beneath Painting Series 2), 2026
Acrylic, lacquer, and medium, and dust from the Philippines on 300 gsm cotton paper
This presentation for the San Francisco Art Fair is supported by Philippine Airlines, the Official Travel Partner of the Artistic Team for the Philippine Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
About the artist
Jon Cuyson (b. Manila, Philippines, 1969) is a Filipino interdisciplinary artist whose practice exists across installation, painting, sculpture, books and moving images. Rooted in queer and postcolonial ecologies, his work explores the sea as a living archive, an unstable site where memory, labor, migration, and desire continually shift and recombine. Everyday Productions is his platform for experimentation across art, cinema and scenography. His work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe, and the United States, including at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS (London); Times Museum (China); and the Bronx Museum (New York). Cuyson studied at the University of the Philippines, Baguio City and Skowhegan in Maine. He earned his MFA in Painting from Columbia and has held academic positions at institutions in Manila. Cuyson is based in the Philippines, where he continues to live and work.
About Mahal Projects
Mara Gladstone (b. New York, USA, 1977) is a curator and educator who founded Mahal Projects to create transdisciplinary, welcoming spaces for art that nurture connections between people and the environment. She has organized exhibitions, public art, programs and publications at Desert X, Palm Springs Art Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum. Prior projects include those with Kelly Akashi, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Gerald Clarke, Gisela Colon, Victoria Fu, Nicholas Galanin, Todd Gray, Pat Lasch, Hung Liu, Karen Lofgren, Wang Qingsong, Adee Roberson, Jono Rotman and Wang Wei. Gladstone is based in the Bay Area and holds degrees from the University of Rochester (MA, PhD) and Brown (BA). She is a dual citizen of the United States and the Philippines.