Allan Arcilla, The Kiss

Allan Arcilla

The Kiss

2025

Oil on canvas

$2200

Artwork statement:
Emergence sits in change, growth, and self-discovery. Each painting feels like a point of arrival, but also a shift—finishing one opens something new in how I see and how I work. The process keeps moving, reshaping itself as I go. Like life, it doesn’t settle. The butterfly returns as a marker of that movement—a quiet sign of becoming something beyond the current self. But that version doesn’t last. It changes again. What feels resolved is only temporary. The work holds that cycle, where each ending folds into another beginning, and the self is always in the process of becoming.

Artist bio:
Allan Arcilla is a Sydney-based contemporary figurative painter. Predominantly self-taught, his practice has developed through close observation of the human figure as a space for emotional truth, self-reflection, and personal transformation.

His work centres on moments of vulnerability and stillness. Working through figurative oil painting and life drawing, Arcilla explores intimacy, desire, and emotional presence. His figures often exist in quiet, suspended states — not performing, but simply being — allowing the viewer to encounter them without narrative or expectation.

Arcilla’s approach to colour and line is deliberate and restrained. His paintings are less about representation  and more about recognition — of oneself, of change, and of the ongoing process of becoming comfortable in one’s own skin. 

For Arcilla, painting is both personal and reflective: a way to process lived experience while inviting others to find their own meaning within the work.