Sethantes X

Sethantes is a Filipino American visual artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, and small-format experimental sketchbooks. Alongside larger works, he maintains an ongoing body of intimate art books that function as self-contained spaces for abstraction, contemplation, and visual inquiry.

His work is rooted in mysticism, symbolism, and esoteric traditions, approached through a restrained, minimalist lens. Rather than illustration or overt narrative, these influences appear as quiet structures, recurring forms, and deliberate absences. Many works resemble artifacts, maps, or remnants of imagined civilizations that feel remembered rather than invented.

Viewers and collectors often describe his work as abstract and naive, qualities that arise not from immediacy alone but from intentional reduction and disciplined simplicity. His sketchbooks, in particular, serve as sites of experimentation—places where repetition, silence, and deviation are allowed to exist without resolution.

Sethantes approaches his practice intuitively but with patience and rigor. He works slowly, allowing systems and symbols to emerge organically over time. Each piece is treated as a complete object rather than a study, meant to stand quietly on its own w...