The colorful surrealist images that are found in the works of artist Melvin Guirhem’s fourth solo exhibition titled “The Memory Remains” show an expansion of his art practice from painting to fabric collages. Guirhem courageously chronicles his personal life in every canvas and in every stitch. In this show, narratives of the artist’s struggle, pain, failures, and success are coded among the almost psychedelic illustrations. In them, the artist remembers the internal and external conflicts that had changed him. These works form a visual memoir, if you will, of someone who desires to understand how the past, present, and future would all come together.

Hailing from Iloilo, Guirhem’s interpretation by means of allegorical figuration is a refreshing take among its realist counterparts. His works, while charged with symbols and metaphors, continue to hold the significant episodes that the artist delicately reveals. Unrelated images are combined together to fill Guirhem’s works. They, too, contribute to his probe for an answer to a conundrum that perpetuates his being --- the hope that in the course of time, all of the memories of what he had been through, everything that had been, would finally make sense.

-Gwen Bautista