Series Title:
“Tubig na Di Nakikita” (Water That Cannot Be Seen)
An Alaismo Portrait Series by Chiron Bautista
Some griefs do not rise.
Some joys do not splash.
Some memories live in water, but never reach the surface.
Water That Cannot Be Seen (Tubig na Di Nakikita) captures the emotion beneath emotion—faces submerged in invisible tides, partially hidden by fluid textures that shimmer, distort, or blur them. Each portrait emerges like a reflection that almost disappears if you stare too hard. The water here is not blue—it’s remembered. The subjects are not drowning—they are suspended.
These are the people you pass by who are still under the surface.
Still listening to echoes. Still glowing, quietly, beneath the current.
*The 1st of the Series: Ripples Where I Once Was
Ripples Where I Once Was is not a portrait of a woman—it is a portrait of what remains after her.
Her gaze does not meet us, because she is not entirely here. She floats within a memory that hasn’t quite surfaced, her face fragmented like moonlight seen through moving water. There are no hard edges here. Only motion. Only traces. Only the silence that follows when a presence leaves and the world, briefly, remembers her outline.
In Alaismo, this painting marks the beginning of erosion through remembering—not by salt, but by silence. The woman is visible, but barely. She is made of echoes. Of what she said once, of how she smiled, of who she almost became. The neural-mosaic texture is fluid now—liquid memory shifting with unseen currents. There is no frame to contain her. She’s already started dissolving into something wider, something quieter.
This is how some people exist.
Not as declarations, but as vibrations.
Not in photos, but in water that ripples differently where they once stood.
This is not about disappearance.
This is about sacred subtlety.
This is about the power of a presence that refused to be loud—
yet never quite left.