Malang's Women: Alt Art 2026: Special Projects

Mauro Malang Santos had a long career as an artist, first showing at Philippine Art Gallery in 1962 with a steady practice until shortly after the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in 2006. Known for his joyous depiction of Filipino life — a stark contrast to the depictions of the ills of society captured by his social realist peers — he provided a snapshot of the pockets of happiness imbued in the Filipino experience, which mirrored his consistently positive disposition and approach to life.

A favoured subject of his was women. Zooming into his cityscapes and barung-barongs, Malang honed in on women vendors, often in the middle of gossip, selling anything from fish to fruit. Malang’s women, as they have been called over the years, capture the familiarity and the affinity we hold with the women in our lives. In them, we see our mothers, sisters, neighbours and friends. A feeling of closeness blooms within, and onto these women, we project feelings of love and warmth.

Rendered with Cubist sensibilities, these women adopt the same style and gesture as the other subject matter Malang began painting, with a combination of textural softness and careful geometry. And of course, colour. He saw the world with such particularity, the resulting work was always singular and impossible to recreate: a careful balance between loud colours, sharp and definite shapes, but also an intangible softness that could only have been possible to come from an artist with a specific vision and skill, a self-assured hand, and a life-long pursuit of creating with no underlying motivations for accolades or recognition.

Almost ten years after his passing, and Malang’s women still occupies a significant space in Philippine art, incomparable, remembered, and well-loved.