Rocelie Delfin invites us into the utopia of her subconscious with raw, poetic images drawn purely from imagination and memory. A series of nine houses were made during a period of quarantine. Devoid of people and animals, with only indoor potted plants, they reflect the isolation she experienced throughout those weeks. She turns her attention instead to structural details and draws them with repetitive lines and patterns, some applied more densely to add qualities of texture and shading. Architectural and interior elements of these fictional houses are pieced together like a seamless collage, offering clues of what she sees daily from her urban home in Quezon City, her rural home in Cavite and her original place of birth Lanao del Norte.
Six larger drawings depict idyllic forests occupied by tropical houses remote from one another. Delfin does not work with references and draws intuitively without first making a pencil sketch. It is an art of immediacy; the ink pen a pragmatic tool for directly and freely communicating, akin to the symbols of a language. Her work is untrammeled by conventions and stylistic trends. The multiple tiny markings make us feel the passage of time, steadiness of focus and deep involvement in the process. There is a consistency and beautiful strangeness in these drawings that show us how a vastness of expression can exist within human confines.
—Stephanie Frodoso
