SPRUCE Gallery presents Fragmentia: Oculations of Reality, a multimedia exhibition by Kevin Pineda that begins with the photograph no one was supposed to keep.

Working with altered photographic prints, tearing, distortion, negative-style processing, applied stress, and brushed stainless steel, Pineda turns discarded images into works that sit between picture, object, surface, and evidence. Blurred frames, misfires, negatives, near-deletions, and altered exposures return in his hands with new physical consequence.

The exhibition is accompanied by curatorial notes titled The Rejected Image Returns, which frame the show around a central proposition: perhaps the rejected image knows something the polished image was trained to hide.

In Fragmentia, the frame is never neutral. Brushed stainless steel becomes casing, threshold, mirror, and accomplice. It grips the image, competes with it, and occasionally seems to wound it. The photograph leaves the flat authority of the print and becomes something closer to an object with nerves.

Many of the works carry the ghost of fashion photography. Beauty remains present, only now it carries a fault line, its editorial confidence beginning to fray. Faces are covered, split, displaced, or made spectral. Bodies retain their camera-ready allure while slipping away from the clean logic of commercial seduction. The glamour remains, but under pressure.

Pineda’s cross-disciplinary background gives the exhibition its particular force. Trained in Interior Architecture at London Metropolitan University, he moved through kitchens, galleries, design studios, and image-making contexts across Europe and Asia. His first apprenticeship was at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome, where he had brief exposure to projects involving Tracey Emin and Anselm Kiefer. He later founded The Room, an experimental creative space near the Colosseum, before developing furniture and object-based work through Ma+Ke Lab in Tallinn with Martin Tonts and Nele Kont. In Fragmentia, that history becomes a way of thinking through material: how a photograph is handled, framed, reflected, stressed, and made to occupy space.

The attached curatorial notes place the exhibition in conversation with Hito Steyerl’s writing on degraded images and Vilém Flusser’s thinking on photography and the apparatus. In Fragmentia: Oculations of Reality, fracture becomes optical. Vision forms through the cut. The rejected image returns, altered, elegant, and faintly dangerous.

Venue
SPRUCE Gallery, UG3 City & Land Mega Plaza, ADB Avenue cor. Garnet Road,
Ortigas Center, Pasig City, Metro Manila, Philippines

Artists
Kevin Pineda

Exhibition Dates
15 May – 11 June 2026

Gallery Hours
Monday – Saturday | 11 AM – 8 PM

Website
https://spruce.gallery

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/sprucegalleryph

Contact
sprucegalleryph@gmail.com

About Artist

Kevin Pineda is a Filipino multidisciplinary artist, photographer, and maker whose practice moves across photography, furniture, interiors, editorial image-making, culinary practice, and gallery work. Trained in Interior Architecture at London Metropolitan University, he developed a practice shaped by material intelligence, spatial thinking, and an instinct for images that behave beyond the flat surface.

Pineda’s formation spans several creative worlds and cities. His early exposure to London and Rome sharpened his visual and spatial sensibility, while his culinary training and professional kitchen experience introduced an exacting discipline around process, timing, pressure, and touch. His first apprenticeship was at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome, where he had brief exposure to projects involving artists such as Tracey Emin and Anselm Kiefer. He later founded The Room, an experimental art space near the Colosseum that operated for five years as a platform for creative exchange.

His move into furniture and object-based work developed further through Ma+Ke Lab in Tallinn, with Martin Tonts and Nele Kont. His editorial and fashion photography work across Milan, Paris, New York, and Manila informs the visual tension of Fragmentia: Oculations of Reality, where glamour, distortion, damage, and material intervention meet. In the exhibition, Pineda works with altered photographs, negative-style treatments, torn surfaces, applied stress, and brushed stainless steel to give rejected images a second optical life.

About Gallery

SPRUCE is an independent magazine gallery and art space located in Ortigas Center, Pasig City, dedicated to print culture, contemporary art, and emerging creative voices. Known for its curated selection of international independent magazines, art publications, and little-known zines from around the world, SPRUCE champions independent publishing, slow discovery, and emerging artists whose work opens new ways of seeing.

(Text and images courtesy of SPRUCE Gallery)