From May 22 to June 13, 2026, SPRUCE Gallery is presenting Fragmentia: Oculations of Reality, a new multimedia exhibition by Kevin Pineda.

Kevin Pineda

Pineda works with photographs that most people would delete: blurred shots, misfires, discarded negatives. He doesn’t fix them. He tears them, mounts them, folds them, hangs them in new ways. What was meant to disappear gets treated as something worth keeping. Many of the images come from fashion. You recognise bodies, faces, a certain kind of editorial gloss. But soon the picture shifts. A face is obscured, a body becomes ghostly. A print lifts off the wall as if resisting its own surface. The glamour is still there, but it looks uneasy. Like it no longer trusts itself.

The curatorial notes use the phrase The Rejected Image Returns. That’s the central idea. The discarded photograph might hold something the finished shot was designed to conceal.

Pineda introduces brushed steel as casing, as mirror, alongside the photographs. It’s an industrial material that makes you aware of the image as a physical thing. Something you could handle.

His background makes sense of the approach. He studied Interior Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He apprenticed at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome, where he had brief contact with projects by Tracey Emin and Anselm Kiefer. He later founded The Room, a creative space near the Colosseum, and developed furniture through Ma+Ke Lab in Tallinn. That mix of places and disciplines shows. His photographs feel built, not just taken.

What emerges is a difficult kind of beauty. Tactile, intelligent, and charged by the image’s refusal to stay presentable. Pineda takes what was supposed to disappear and gives it consequence. The result is refined and wounded, with a faint edge of danger. Which is probably a healthier relationship to glamour than the spotless version ever was.

Exhibition Dates: May 22, 2026 – June 13, 2026
Venue: SPRUCE Gallery, UG3 City & Land Mega Plaza, ADB Avenue cor. Garnet Road,
Ortigas Center, Pasig City, Metro Manila, Philippines