In “In The Water Between Them”, Palileo turns back toward the ancestral landscape held within her family’s generational memory — the Pagsanjan River in Laguna province, Philippines. The work is both an homage to the sublime waterfall and mythic scenery, and a reanimation of family history.
The artist initially constructed the composition in her studio using old photographs, postcards, and archival images, and only completed the work after she later visited the site in person — creating a layered fusion of the imaginary and the real. In the painting, horseback riders and tropical foliage interweave within fluid brushstrokes and strata of color, while the waterfall and surface of the water refract a fantastical play of light.
The work continues Palileo’s signature strategy: through layered narrative and a language reminiscent of magical realism, she braids colonial history, diasporic experience, and personal emotion into a single pictorial field. It functions simultaneously as an homage to cultural inheritance and origin, and as an act of rewriting what is seen and unseen in history.