Residual evidence in Austria’s FMLA art exhibit
City of Makati – The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the 18th solo show of Filipino artist based in New York Julio Jose “Jojo” Austria, is defined as an unpaid and job-protected time off granted to employees specifically to care for an immediate family member. The United States’ Department of Labor administers FMLA.
The show poster was based on an actual form that the artist filled out as a Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) worker of nine years. He only applied for eight weeks, or from January 24 to March 21, 2026, from the maximum period of 12 weeks allowed by the act.
In the show notes, the term leave of absence (LOA) took on a dual meaning. As applied to the artist’s employment, it is a return to familial duty in the Philippines. As applied to his artistic practice, his physical absence in studio work brings a different kind of presence within the paintings themselves.
“The works in this exhibition bear the imprint of that divided temporality—the strain of sustaining an artistic practice while laboring for survival abroad and tending to loved ones at home,” the exhibition notes writer Jevijoe Vitug said.
He added: “Austria’s experience resonates with the broader condition of many working class Filipino migrants for whom mobility is both opportunity and sacrifice, and for whom distance is measured in remittances, phone calls, and deferred rest.”
Vitug is likewise a visual artist based in New York with an MFA obtained from the San Francisco Art Institute. A recipient of the 2006 Thirteen Artists Awards from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), his works explore labor, migration, and visibility through multidisciplinary practice.
Austria, a first generation US migrant in his family since 2010 or for 16 years to-date, showcases a total of seven new oil on canvas paintings consisting of two small works which he did in New York: Silent Gathering and Algorithm of Decay both measuring 20 x 16 inches; and five large works, four of which are at 4 x 3 feet and one at 5 x 4 feet.
The 5 x 4 feet piece titled The Distance She Carried Me captures an abstracted image of his mother Gloria Sapida Austria, a former music teacher in St. Scholastica’s College Manila, in a gurney tended to by a caregiver in the family residence in Cavite. Austria’s mother suffered a stroke in 2023. Postscript on the show poster states that sales proceeds of the exhibition will go toward her medical expenses.
Vitug generously compares Austria’s ethos, refracted images, and visual language to that of Joseph Beuys, Pablo Picasso, and Joe Bradley respectively. “His practice recalls the expanded ethos of Joseph Beuys for whom the artwork functioned less as an autonomous object and more as a document of lived experience and social reality,” the notes writer said.
Beuys, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, blurred the lines between art and life and used his life as a tool to create art. The German-born artist who served as a warplane rear gunner in World War II called his performance art as actions, and was a political and environmental activist.
As for Austria’s refracted images, Vitug recalls Picasso’s Guernica in Algorithm of Decay: “The exhaustion of a laborer worked to death is not depicted literally. Instead, Austria turns to symbolism. The carabao becomes an emblem of cyclical endurance, of a body subsumed by obligation. The ‘algorithm’ here is routine its elf: wake, labor, return, repeat. Decay is not sudden—it is cumulative.”
Known as a beast of burden, the carabao is the national animal of the Philippines which represents hard work. The colloquial expression kayod-kalabaw, roughly translated into working hard like a carabao, pulls the familiar image of both man and beast manually plowing the rice fields for the entire day while exposed to the heat of the sun and other elements.
The more common interpretation of the two animal figures, the bull (toro) and the horse (caballo), in Picasso’s Guernica can be found in the pablopicasso.org website: “The rampaging bull, a major motif of destruction here, has previously figured, whether as a bull or Minotaur, as Picasso’s ego. However, in this instance the bull probably represents the onslaught of Fascism. He also stated that the horse represented the people of Guernica.”
As contrast, Austria’s visual language, though mostly muted with passings of bright colors, reminds Vitug of contemporary visual artist Joe Bradley who uses bold colors on large canvases to create “anxious yet playful surfaces”. Bradley is also based in New York.
The large works A Stanchion Story and In Motion are inspired by what Austria sees daily at his workplace. The first piece seemingly speaks to the exclusivity of art with the stanchion serving as a physical barricade. The second evokes the consumerist aspect of the products for sale in the MoMA Design Store.
Orbit of Response and Controlled Detonation have references to his pianist-mother. For Orbit, a portion of Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune sheet music, a favorite piece of Ms. Austria, is enclosed in the spherical shape. In Controlled Detonation, a small and almost negligible portion of sheet music is found in the upper part of the painting.
According to Vitug, the exhibiting artist’s canvases do not reflect biography but absorb it and in so doing the remaining surface becomes a product of negotiations – between cities, between roles, between grief and perseverance. In Austria’s hands, “abstraction becomes a form of testimony. The paintings insist that presence is not singular or stable. It is something assembled, contested, and, ultimately, painted into being.”
FMLA opened on Friday the 13th of March, and will close on April 7, 2026 at Art Cube Philippines located in OPVI Centre in Makati City.
