Selected Works

Jonathan Madeja

From the island of Alad, where the boats are small and the sea is everything — a body of work made entirely of ink, patience, and memory. A Private Viewing

The Artist b. 1988, Romblon

Before I was anything, I was a small boy on a small boat. My father was a fisherman. So were his brothers. The island of Alad in Romblon was the size of a prayer — you could walk it in an afternoon. We learned the sea before we learned the alphabet. We learned hunger before we learned shame.

Later I went to Manila. I sold things in malls. I worked in factories. I sent money home. I lived in rooms where the ceiling was so low you could hear your neighbours breathing. The figures I draw — most of them have my face. They are carrying what I carried. They are tired the way I was tired.

I use ink because ink does not forgive. You cannot lift it back out of the canvas. Every dot stays where you put it, the way every year stays where you spent it. I draw one dot at a time because that is how my father pulled the line — slowly, slowly, and only what the sea was willing to give.

These works are not about the poor. I do not know how to be about the poor. They are made by someone the poor raised. If something in them feels like a wound, it is because I have not closed it yet. I am not sure I want to.

— Jonathan Madeja

Some of these have already left the studio. They live now on other people's walls, in other people's lives. I think about them sometimes. I hope they are warm where they are.

The Acquired

Works that have already found their people. Kept here as memory — so the family that raised me, and the sea that made me, will not be forgotten.

Hanapin ang Sagot 2025 · Diptych

Hanapin ang Sagot

Pen and ink on canvas · 48 × 36 in · 2025 Acquired

I painted myself twice in this one. On one side, the boy I was before I left — kneeling in the mangroves, still close to the bones of the island. On the other, the man I became — paddling away, hat low, holding a small fish in the dark because the dark was where the fish were.

Between the two boats, between the two of me, all the small round things I have lost track of: pearls, hours, faces, the moons of a hundred quiet nights. I am still asking which of them I was supposed to keep.

ii.

Yakap

Pen and ink on canvas · 36 × 24 in · 2025 Acquired

My father used to bring home the catch and lay them on the wooden table the way you would lay a child down. Carefully. He never thanked the sea out loud, but he handled what it gave him like he was trying not to wake it.

This is the way I learned to hold a fish before I knew the word love. The line still in its mouth. The eye still bright. The feeling — that I owe this animal something I will never be able to pay back.

Yakap — a young man embracing a large fish

Yakap 2025

Ilaw — a figure riding a seahorse holding a glowing lamp

Ilaw 2025 · 60 × 48 in

iii.

Ilaw

Pen and ink on canvas · 60 × 48 in · 2025 Acquired

We used to go out at night with a lamp. That was the whole tool. A lamp, a small boat, a man, the sea. The fish came toward the light because they did not know better, and we did not know how else to feed anyone.

I painted my own heart inside the lamp because that is what it felt like, going out into the dark with the only thing you had. Holding it up. Hoping it would be enough to bring something home.

iv.

Tagapakinig

Pen and ink on canvas · 36 × 36 in · 2024 Acquired

My mother listened to everyone. Tito's troubles. The neighbours. The aunt who came over to cry about her husband. She would nod, and stir the pot, and nod again. I never saw her tell anyone she was tired.

I made this for her, and for everyone who learned to fold themselves into a small shape so somebody else's voice would fit inside the room. The shell is half open. The pearl is watching. She was always still listening, even after we thought she had gone to sleep.

Tagapakinig — a coiled fish with a human ear

Tagapakinig 2024

Tagasunod 2024

Tagasunod

Pen and ink on canvas · 36 × 36 in · 2025 Acquired

On the factory floor my body learned to start and stop without my permission. The bell rang. We worked. The bell rang. We ate. The bell rang. We went home. After a while you do not even remember what your hands wanted to do before someone else told them.

I drew myself folded up small, with the key in my back, because that is what it felt like. Wound up by something I could not see. Doing my turns. Hoping nobody noticed how much of me had already been used.

Ang mamatay ng dahil sayo — a young man with a flag bound at his throat

Ang mamatay ng dahil sayo 2024

vi.

Ang mamatay ng dahil sayo

Pen and ink on canvas · 36 × 24 in · 2024 Acquired

We learned to sing it before we understood it. Aming ligaya na 'pag may mang-aapi, ang mamatay ng dahil sa 'yo. Standing in the schoolyard at seven years old, hand over chest, promising to die for something nobody had explained to us yet.

Years later I painted myself with the flag folded into a knot at my own throat. Eyes closed. Still standing. Because we have been asked, my whole life, to keep loving a country that does not always remember to love us back.

vii.

Hugas Bigas

Pen and ink on canvas · 20 × 16 in · 2024 Acquired

At home, my mother never threw the rice water away. She saved it. She gave it to the dogs, the plants, the neighbour whose milk had run out. The smallest things had a second life and a third in our kitchen. Nothing was wasted because nothing could afford to be.

I painted the boy lifting the pail off his head, and the small cross that was hiding underneath. The black cat is watching the way our cats always watched — like they knew something we did not. Something blessed in the work of getting through one more day.

Hugas bigas — boy lifting a pail with cat beside

Hugas Bigas 2024

viii.

Tala

Pen and ink on paper · 16 × 11 in · 2024 Acquired

We had no electricity for a long time on the island. The sky was the only thing that came on at night. I would lie on the sand and try to learn the stars by heart, in case I ever needed them later — and later, in the city, I did.

I gave him my own face and put the sky I grew up under inside his chest. So that when he buttons his shirt in the morning and goes to work, nobody will know what he is carrying around. But he will know. And the fish will know.

Tala — a man holding a fish with a starlit sky inside his chest

Tala 2024

Bulag — a crouching man holding crumpled money to his eyes

Bulag 2024

ix.

Bulag

Pen and ink on canvas · 24 × 16 in · 2024 Acquired

Twenty pesos. The price of a piece of bread, a jeepney home, a small dignity you agree not to ask about. I have taken that money. I have given it. I have watched people I love close their eyes for less.

I painted him from behind because I could not look him in the face. He is barefoot on the tile. He is crouched the way we crouch when we are tired but the day is not finished with us. He is me, on the days I was too tired to see.

Pipi

Pen and ink on canvas · 24 × 16 in · 2024 Acquired

There are things I have seen that I have not said out loud, not even at home, not even after the lights were off. Some of it is too small for a story. Some of it is too big. Most of it is in the middle, where the words live that no one taught us yet.

He has two pairs of eyes and one closed mouth. The bill in his hands is what he was paid to keep quiet. I know him. I have been him. I am sorry to him.

Pipi — a man with goggles and money covering his mouth

Pipi 2024

Bingi — a kneeling man covering his ears with a bill

Bingi 2024

xi.

Bingi

Pen and ink on canvas · 24 × 16 in · 2024 Acquired

The third one. I made them as a family — what we agree not to see, not to say, not to hear. I did not want to make all three. I had to. They would not let me stop at two.

He is on his knees with his hands over his ears. He is the version of me that survived by not listening when they told me what I was worth. I am not proud of him. I am not ashamed of him either. He is the reason I am still here.

Sabaw — a shark fin rising from an antique Chinese bowl

Sabaw 2024

xii.

Sabaw

Pen and ink on canvas · 24 × 20 in · 2024 Acquired

The first time I saw a shark on our boat, my father did not look pleased or proud. He looked like a man at a funeral he had not been invited to. He cut it carefully. He used everything. He talked about it later the way you talk about someone you respected and could not save.

Now I see what is left of those animals in bowls in rooms I would not be allowed to enter. I painted one. Just one. The bowl is beautiful. The water is the colour of the sea we are still arguing over. The fish does not get to speak.

Hanap at Buhay — boy spiraling out of his clothes with a paper boat at his feet

Hanap at Buhay 48 × 24 in

Hanap at Buhay — a figure spiraling inside a fish skeleton

Hanap at Buhay 48 × 24 in

xiii — xiv.

Hanap at Buhay

Pen and ink on canvas · 48 × 24 in (each) · 2024 Acquired · Diptych

Hanapbuhay. We use the word for our jobs, our work, the thing we do to live. But the word is really two words pretending to be one — the search, and the life. Every day for a long time, I had only the first half.

On one panel, the boy I was — being slowly unwound out of his own shirt, a single fish swimming through the empty space where his chest used to be, a paper boat by his foot for the journey nobody had given him yet. On the other, the man I almost stayed becoming — suspended inside the skeleton of his catch, while the small lucky cat smiles up from the floor as if the answer is just behind him. We are both still looking. I think we always will be.

Talaan — a curled figure with a giant accusing finger above

Talaan 2023

xv.

Talaan

Pen and ink on paper · 30 × 20 in · 2023 Acquired

There were years when a list was a death sentence. You did not need a trial. You needed only a name on a piece of paper and the wrong neighbour reading it out loud. I knew faces that disappeared that way. Cousins of cousins. People we ate with at fiestas.

I drew him from above, the way the hand sees him. Barefoot on the paper. Covering his face. He had heard the footsteps coming for a long time. He had hoped the list was wrong about him. The list was almost never wrong about anyone.

xvi.

Unos

Pen and ink on canvas · 40 × 30 in · 2022 Acquired

The storms came in fast. Sometimes we could outrun them. Sometimes we could only kneel in the bottom of the boat and wait to see if it was going to be one of those days. My father never said he was afraid. I think he was always a little bit afraid.

I painted my own face in the weather of those years — the rain that was never just rain, the hooks falling out of a sky that should have been kinder. The two small hooks on his cheeks are the only tears he is going to let himself have. He has work to do. The work is the only thing that loved him back.

Unos — a young man under a storm of fishhooks

Unos 2022

xvii.

Isda

Pen and ink on canvas · 20 × 16 in · 2025 Acquired

Just one fish. Hung by the tail. A small stone beside it on the ground. This is what a day's work looked like sometimes — the whole boat out before dawn, and this is what we brought home to feed five people.

I did not want to add anything else to the picture. I did not want to be clever about it. This is what I remember. This is what was there. I signed it small, the way my father used to sign for things.

Isda — a single fish hung by the tail, framed in dark wood

Isda 2025

Kaloob — a young man riding a clown fish through the clouds

Kaloob 2024 · 40 × 30 in

xviii.

Kaloob

Pen and ink on canvas · 40 × 30 in · 2024 Acquired

Kaloob is what you give without being asked. The small offering on the windowsill. The first share of the catch you leave on the rocks for whoever the sea answers to. My grandmother did this her whole life and never explained it once.

Here I let the fish carry me instead. The heart I tied to its side is the only thing of mine I had left worth giving. The snail is patient. The cloud is moving. I do not look back. I am not sure I am allowed to.

And these — the ones still in the studio. Still mine, for now. Waiting for the wall, the room, the quiet hour they will belong to.

The Available

Recent works still in my hands. Each one is the only one of itself. If a piece finds you, write to me — I would like to know whose wall it is going to.

Hiling Available

Hiling

Pen and ink on canvas · 36 × 24 in · 2025 Available

When I was a boy I believed in shooting stars. The whole island did. You would lie out on the sand and wait for one and whisper to it whatever was breaking your heart that month. New shoes for the school year. A father's safe return. A mother's medicine.

I am older now. I have stopped wishing for most things. But there is still a part of me that wraps himself in the flag like a blanket and looks up. His lips are just barely moving. He has not given up yet. He is not ready to.

Price upon inquiry — enquire privately

Santelmo — a young man between bamboo rafts surrounded by floating flames

Santelmo Available

ii.

Santelmo

Pen and ink on canvas · 48 × 36 in · 2025 Available

The old men on the island called them santelmo. Small white fires that drifted on the water at night, where boats had gone down. They said it was the souls of fishermen who had not made it home, looking for the way back.

I painted myself among them. Not afraid. We grew up knowing some of these lights by name. We knew whose father, whose brother. You learn to paddle through them, gently, the way you would walk past a sleeping child. They are not trying to scare you. They are only trying not to be forgotten.

Price upon inquiry — enquire privately

iii.

Lipad

Pen and ink on canvas · 36 × 36 in · 2025 Available

Children on the island had a game. We would close our eyes and pretend we were flying — over the boats, over the church, over the sea our parents would not let us go on alone. The trick was to believe it for as long as you could before the older boys laughed.

I still play it, sometimes. The boy with the goggles is the one who never stopped. He blows into the shell because that is what we did when we wanted somebody to find us. Below him a small boat is crossing the water. A cat is in it. He is looking down at me, asking if I am coming home.

Price upon inquiry — enquire privately

Lipad — a boy on a winged fish above the clouds

Lipad Available

Watak-Watak ang Tala ng Watawat — a fallen figure covered by the flag, smoke rising

Watak-Watak ang Tala ng Watawat Available · 48 × 72 in

iv.

Watak-Watak ang Tala ng Watawat

Pen and ink on canvas · 48 × 72 in · 2025 Available

Somebody you knew. Somebody's son. Somebody's brother. They came at night and in the morning the family was making coffee for police who had nothing to say. The flag was put over him because that is what we do when there are no other words left.

This is my largest available work and it took me a long time to finish. I kept stepping away from it. The smoke rising where the head should be — I could not bring myself to draw the face. The single star at the horizon is what is left of a country that used to be a whole sky. The little boat is leaving. I do not know if it is coming back.

Price upon inquiry — enquire privately

Iyo, Akin

Pen and ink on canvas · 36 × 24 in · 2025 Available

There is a tenderness you carry for someone who never knew it was for them. You buy the flower. You bring it home. You fall asleep with it still in your sleeve because the right moment never came, and now the room is empty, and the bulb has gone out, and the chess piece on the floor is the only witness you have left.

Iyo, akin. Yours, mine. The two smallest words in our language and the hardest to put in the right order. I have not always known the difference. I have not always been told.

Price upon inquiry — enquire privately

Iyo, Akin — a sleeping figure resting on a frame, holding a rose

Iyo, Akin Available

Pasan Patungo — two blindfolded figures rowing a galleon ship

Pasan Patungo Available · 36 × 48 in

vi.

Pasan Patungo

Pen and ink on canvas · 36 × 48 in · 2025 Available

The ship in the picture is a Spanish galleon. The young men rowing it have their eyes covered. They are not looking at what they are carrying. Underneath the hull, a small boy is sleeping on thorns in the uncle's striped hat. He is the country. He has been the country for a very long time.

I painted this thinking about all the ones who came before me — my great-grandfather, his father, the names we lost — who rowed without being told where. We are still rowing. We are mostly still blindfolded. The crocodile at the edge of the picture is patient. I painted him patient on purpose.

Price upon inquiry — enquire privately

vii.

Lupang Pangako

Pen and ink on canvas · 40 × 24 in · 2024 Available

Here is the choice we have been giving to our children for as long as I have been alive. An empty pot in one hand. A gun in the other. The country leans down from a beautiful crown — and the crown is not made of gold, it is made of arms, and every arm wants something from him.

He is bowing his head not because he is praying. He is bowing because he is tired. He is a boy. He is somebody's son. He is the promise we made him and then asked him to pay for. I painted his bare feet last so I would not have to stop looking at them.

Price upon inquiry — enquire privately

Lupang Pangako — a boy bound to a tentacled crown, holding a pot and a gun

Lupang Pangako Available

Tabing dagat — a deflated American-flag inflatable on a beach with a warship in the distance

Tabing Dagat Available · 24 × 36 in

viii.

Tabing Dagat

Pen and ink on canvas · 24 × 36 in · 2024 Available

Somebody had a party here. The children played all afternoon. They went home and forgot the inflatable on the sand. By morning the air was gone, and the stars and stripes on it were lying face up on the same beach where my grandfather used to mend his nets.

I painted the ship rusting in the bay behind it — the one that has been sitting there since before I was born — because some things leave and some things only pretend to. The valve is loose. The afternoon is ending. No one is coming back for either of them.

Price upon inquiry — enquire privately

My first studio was a boat. My first teachers were my father's hands. Everything I know about waiting, I learned before I knew it was waiting.

The Artist

Jonathan Madeja was born in 1988 on Alad — a small fishing island in Romblon you can walk across in an afternoon. His father was a fisherman. So were his uncles. He grew up in a house where the sea was a kind of neighbour, sometimes generous, often not.

In his twenties he did what his generation has been doing for as long as anyone can remember: he left. Manila gave him sales floors, factory lines, rented rooms with low ceilings. He sent money home. He kept drawing in the small hours, on whatever paper he could find. He is self-taught — which is to say, the sea taught him first, and everything since has been learning a second language for what he already knew.

He works almost entirely in archival pen and ink. He chose ink because ink is permanent — the way the years he is drawing from are permanent. His figures are usually his own face. His subjects are class, labour, faith, migration, and the small steady dignity of people who do not get drawn very often. His work has shown across the Philippines and in the United States, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Japan.

Selected Exhibitions

Solo

2024Tabing DagatAltro Mondo, Manila
2023DayoArt Verité Gallery
2022KuwadernoArt Break
2021LargaLab Art Project Gallery
2021BanwaArt Cube Philippines

Currently

202620 Years of Arts and StoriesNational Museum of Fine Arts · CANVAS

Forthcoming

Jul 2026Solo ExhibitionThe Boston Gallery
Oct 2026Solo ExhibitionArt Verité
—Children's Storybook ProjectCANVAS

Private Viewing Room

If something here stays with you

Write to me. Tell me which one, and a little about why. I would rather know whose wall a piece is going to than how quickly it can get there. I read every message myself.

Instagram → Write to the Studio →

@jmadejaartph · jmadejaartph@gmail.com
Each work is one of one, signed, with a certificate. Shipping can be arranged anywhere.