At first sight, Katrina Cuenca's art brings to mind Georgia O'Keeffe's famously enlarged flowers. But after a beat, you realize that no, it's actually closer to iPhone's famous series of 4k Betta Fish wallpapers.

The series of Betta Fish iPhone wallpapers feature a sole iridescent and vivid Siamese fighting fish floating in the center of a deep, impenetrable black space, their caudal fins like petals blossoming in the midst of nothingness.

Cuenca's hybrid of faceless betta and petal-like formations are also iridescent, but her caudal fins are pastel-colored, soft, and feminine, dominated by millennial pinks, pale blues, and whimsy yellows.

Cuenca's abstract objects are sometimes off-center, like spring flowers bursting from the corner of the frame, or a betta swimming by, displaying its balletic fins before disappearing into the unknown.

Instead of a black background, the 38-year-old Cuenca's fish-slash-petals float gracefully in a space of gold, giving her paintings a fancy, elegant touch. You can imagine them hanging on the wall of a hotel room, or in a posh lobby of a high-rise condominium.

Cuenca's solo exhibit called "Slowly We Unfurl," which runs until 25 November at Galerie Joaquin Rockwell, is a collection of different-sized oil paintings of ultra-neat, pale-colored fish-petals that seem to move in a fluid-like motion. The background is gold leaf; square sheets painstakingly gilded on canvas.

She has sculptures, too, of these pastel blooms. The metallic-like pieces with their white base twirl slowly, shimmering and swimming in the air, as if plucked out from the world of Lisa Frank.

Yet, despite its familiar imagery, "Slowly We Unfurl" evokes a sense of serenity and calmness. Of luxury and lightness. Like the weight of the world has been lifted.

ROOTED IN GRIEF
The sense of freedom that Cuenca's signature art inspires in the viewer is no coincidence. Her exhibit, after all, is tagged as the "re-emergence" and "re-blossoming" of humanity from the clutches of the pandemic lockdowns. As restrictions are gradually easing, our freedoms are slowly unfurling.

During an intimate roundtable talk with Cuenca over Cafe Sanso's scrumptious three-course meal, I got curious about Cuenca's parents, the people who spawned the self-taught artist, who graduated with a Finance degree from De La Salle University (but briefly took an online course at MoMa recently). So, I asked her about them.

That's when Cuenca unfurled and opened up. The inspiration for her signature art stems far beyond our post-pandemic recovery.

Behind the layers of her pleated flowers and fins lies a tale of grief.

Cuenca lost her mother, who was also her best friend, in 2018 — two years before the virus locked us all up in our own islands of pain.

She shared that her mother, who died at the young age of 56, loved betta fish and that she would often catch her gazing at their flowy caudal fins for long stretches of time. Perhaps to destress, or her mother was simply enchanted by how the fins would move against the current of the aquarium water.

The death of Cuenca's mother devastated the budding artist, and in the early months of 2019, she began to channel her grief into a canvas, recreating her mother's favorite fish in abstract strokes. Each experimentation with various media — resin, oil, copper, brass, and others — slowly healed her soul from an immense loss.

"Painting is therapeutic for me. It helped me 100 percent recover from the loss of my mother. One hundred percent." Cuenca said, temporarily setting down her fork and knife, her slender fingers emphasizing her words.

THE UNFURLING
In some of her paintings, there's a surprising shot of black in the midst of all the pretty colors. She explained that it's not Anish Kapoor's Vantablack — but Black 3.0, a black acrylic pigment that absorbs up to 99 percent light.

The black element feels like a black hole left by Cuenca's mother. As the artist grows and matures, her art coloring her world, there will always be an unfillable void from the passing of her mother. But light is beginning to seep in.

She also shared that her art was born inside a matchbox room in a condominium, where she, her husband, and their son stayed during the Covid-19 lockdown years. Her makeshift studio was perpetually stuffy because of the spectacular delicateness of the gold-leaf gilding process.

From that tiny, airless space, she produced airy, light things that move freely where there is light, her soul refusing to be imprisoned.

Such is the gift of art.

Now, along with Cuenca, we are collectively recovering from an era of quarantines and deathbeds, of suffocation and claustrophobia. Her blooming paintings and artwork symbolize resiliency, and the human spirit gliding into a new beginning.