Julio Austria has a long-term affair with the city – its industrial weaves, strata of “development” and mercurial evolution. And like any affair, he oscillates between affection and frustration. The frames of his works are inhabited by the layers of obsession, somewhat glorifying and dissing urban progress and decay at the same time. In his previous series Concrete and Steel Cosmos, Austria exhibits his keen familiarity of the irregular cityscape, the various veins that run amok as well as the smog and murky waters.

This Way Out, on the other hand, demonstrates a progress in his relationship with the city. As much as he portrays the urban jungle as a space of disarray in his past series, he has captured merely that. His sentiments for a more polished urban landscape have become more defined, more assertive in This Way Out. Here he has chosen to pay heed to railways, roads and the conservation and improvement in infrastructure by portraying spaces outside the urban plot. Austria makes these issues stark by placing the metropolis in its magnificent mess side by side edifices from other settings - such as the suburban, country side, and province – as seen in “Six o'clock Habit” and “Saving the Walls that Could Not Speak.” The former is a scene from Cavite, the church having accompanied him as he grew up, while the other piece refers to the preserved cultural sites of places he has been to abroad. By setting them against the polluted landscape of Manila as Austria knows it, he raises the question of restoration and preservation in the midst of industrial growth.  Continued...