Ian Castaneda and his love affair with art is a cliché of haunting passion. Having set foot in the corporate world with a stable career in a multi-national company, Ian paints any chance he could. Living a parallel life in capitalist, highly extroverted modern working class life and the greatly introverted studio life of a painter, Ian expectedly set foot to concentrate on painting. He has since exhibited his paintings in group exhibits in various galleries, including the painting+poetry exhibit Verse To Form wherein he painted imageries in response to poems and which travels to different spaces until now. As a citizen of both the practical and the cerebral, Ian’s body of work is an anthology of metaphors about our existence. His Un/Fold series, a repetitive rendition of crumpled sheets of paper, tells such metaphors in midsentences. Philosophical and yet easily intelligible, Ian’s pieces are a seeming utterance of our thoughts and ways in medias res. As the artist puts it, we crumple only to be unfolded, we hide and keep to be able to disclose, we get to the brink of giving up simply to have a greater victory, and we crumble only to burst open. Well received by art patrons, art scholars and enthusiasts, it is most likely this universal appeal of utter verbose quitness and active stillness of Ian’s works that engages viewers in lengthy conversations with his pieces. Quite captivating that the artist’s quiet nature, springing from a humble childhood in tranquil Baguio and simply straighforward education from St. Louis University, can intimately relate to a vast audience. Here we witness the mediary capacity of art to traverse thoughts and experiences with a simple chance of a painting connecting to a pair of eyes. Ian furthers his exploration of the metaphor of ‘crumpling’ in displaying peoples emotions and memories in his typical obsessive renderings of draperies, folds and creases.