Arlo Jake Lagmay

19.07.2025 – 23.08.2025

19.7.2025 – 23.8.2025

In FORTRESS, Arlo Jake Lagmay paints a standoff dressed as a scene of growth. Two pods, each cradling eyes instead of seeds, face one another across a muddied reflection. It’s a world that feels lush but uneasy, where even nature keeps watch. The gaze here is not passive — it guards, it remembers.

There’s no promise of safety in this work. The pods stand like sentries, holding their ground in a landscape thick with weather and shadow. It’s a threshold — not just between figures, but between what’s exposed and what stays shielded. There is no comfort in these eyes; only the tension of knowing that to survive is to see, to stay aware.

Lagmay, a Filipino artist and architect based in Basel, works between systems and their fractures. Architecture taught him about form, control, and protection; painting is where he lets those break open. His visual language is one where bodies, objects, and terrains collapse into each other, always under a quiet pressure. FORTRESS is part of that inquiry — a meditation on watching, withholding, and what it takes to stay intact.