MANILA, Philippines - Painting holds sway as a mnemonic rite, amid the careening rush of cinematography, video, radio and YouTube streaming. Painting revives emotional resonances by fixing sense-filled marks that re-instill the deep awe at snatches of creation that one has either discovered or stumbled onto. Painting has this umbilical intimacy, this conduit to inner reverb.

Didi Domingo proposes this verity in a series of acrylics that gasp at the stunning Palawan landscape, its columns of craggy rock thrusting through the glassy azure, shards of eternity?s intrusion into pacific terrain.

Domingo?s paintings pay no homage to a freckled tourist?s cellphone snapshot. They are inward as opposed to scenic, built on rearresting an encounter with the sublime, as is wont when we are lost into a concealed crevice of paradise.

She revitalizes these moments in raw, flattened chroma, scrumbled in earthy lavenders, ochre grays, somber cobalts and bittersweet pinks, wrestling with the subtle, chasing the vapid, reinstalling the shock of first-hand encounter.

There is doubtless a residue of the Fauvist here. One might also reference German Romantics, old and new. Look up Arnold Bocklin?s ?Isle of the Dead.? Revisit Caspar David Friedrich?s somber shorelines.

Closer to today, one flashes back to Ibarra de la Rosa?s reductions of landscape into chromatic analogies. And to Anslem Kiefer?s elegaic reprise of the euphorically melancholic Saxon wheatfields.

Domingo has cordoned off a haven in her memory to rebuild this hypnotic aura, and we are wooed in for a fleeting glimpse. Her reconstruction of bliss in pared-down geometries harks back to both American dreamscapist Albert Pinkham Ryder and Connie Gordon?s autodidact schemes.

Obstinate pursuit

It must be understood that Domingo inhabits the realm of the amateur, in the French nuance not of dabbler but of obstinate pursuit which happens not to be livelihood.

She has served as a high state functionary, administering the office that deals with migration and immigration. She has company in this realm.

After a near decade of wartime grief, Winston Churchill found solace in his English pastorales. King Bhumibol of Thailand has his muses in pigment as well. Henri Rousseau, the naïf French customs official, gave art history some of the most uncustomarily private reveries. Roger Vadim sought focus in the still traces of paint. Singer Cynthia Alexander hand-renders all her album jackets.

There is enough to be said of painting free from the obliging of a wage.

Paradoxically, the sweeping grandeur of Palawan in actuality is best recalled by the minute gesture. As citizens of a televised globe, we are daily guaranteed the professional cameraman?s impeccable calendar version. We are drenched to drowning in prettified vistas, as our nations hawk their bleached shores for the currencies of strangers.

Yet, if for a brief spell we set aside tourism and its Photoshopped pitches, we may just chance upon the most vivid recall in the diaries of color that some among us struggle to pin down in the face of the ineffable, at the edge of the frontier. As Didi Domingo just might.

Andrea Domingo?s ?The Last Frontier: Emotions Evoked,? will open on Feb. 22, 6 p.m., Galerie Astra, LRI Design Plaza, 210 Nicanor Garcia St. (formerly Reposo), Bel Air II, Makati City. The exhibit, which runs until March 6, kicks off the fourth anniversary of LRI Plaza.

Other anniversary events: Feng Shui Lecture on Interior Design by Master Joseph Chau, March 1, 2:30 p.m.; Art & Collectibles Auction by Kayamang Asya, March 8, 3 p.m.; and collaborated design exhibit on condo living by Pinky Peralta of The Room Upstairs and four other interior designers, March 14-29.