Desire & The Dirge of Cicadas: Martine Velasco at The Crucible Gallery

Imagine a garden of flowers that bleed light, as the cicadas sing with the intent of nonexistence.

- IGAN D'BAYAN

Nothing romantic about it at all, just something closer to hunger, older than longing, mainly "a heat between absence and revelation."

These are the first thoughts that come to mind when looking at Martine Velasco's artworks at her recent show at The Crucible Gallery in SM Megamall and having a chance to correspond with her. You see, Martine has always viewed desire as a deep, internal longing: less about romance, more about the psyche. Anne Carson's writing, which describes desire as both pleasure and pain, resonated with her and matched the dualities already present in her work. The cicadas in her show symbolized this well: creatures that wait their whole lives for one final connection before dying. They also held personal meaning, tied to her childhood in her family's garden. This became the root of the garden theme. Here nature functions as an emotional mirror.

"I've always resonated with the idea of desire as intense longing," Velasco explains, "something that relates more to the psyche than acts of romance." The show, spanning luminous oil paintings and assemblage sculpture, made that tension visible. It reframes desire not as connection, but as the space between.

Velasco's thinking around the show began with Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, a book that defines desire through contradiction — pleasure and pain held in the same breath. That paradox is echoed in the exhibition's dual figures, paired forms, and opposing materials. Her paintings are populated by ghostly cicadas and radiant silhouettes.

"Reframing it as a paradox triggered a recognition," she explains. "My style always leaned into moments of duality and contrast. In the show it manifests through textural oppositions in the sculptures, and in the literal sense as twin or mirrored subjects in the paintings."