In Time: ‘The Clock Dreams of Faces’, Mai Pimentel de Dios renders the face as a vessel where duration leaves its mark – stretched, fractured, and unsettled by the very mechanism that seeks to contain it. 

In this body of work, the artist refuses to present time as an orderly measurement -- hours, minutes, seconds – but rather paints it as the very force that distorts and remakes the self. Each figure is a record of rupture; an existential reflection dispersed across time’s grid. Therefore, time here is not linear, not mechanical. It is an interval – caught between vanishing and becoming, stretched by the deliberate violence of passing hours.

The materials themselves carry memory. Wood, with its rings and grains, carries its own biography of time: each grain a history of growth, each cut a wound of survival. The clocks – cold, precise – enter as both witness and aggressor. Its hands divide and cut, promising order but also deliver fracture. Together, these mediums mirror the way memory falters, ordering an intrusion that unsettles any possibility of wholeness.

Yet, there is tenderness here. In each distortion lies the refusal to vanish entirely. The fractured faces do not annihilate meaning; they linger like half-remembered dreams, a hymn to what time steals but cannot erase. The geometrical figures, albeit fragmented, are not simply formal devices but embody the instability of being itself. Time, in these works, does not merely pass – it inhabits from within.

With these works curated in consideration of certain significant atomic time crossovers, de Dios blurs the line between the lived and the scientific. To look at each work is to feel time not as an abstraction but as intimacy. And in its collapse, the artist invites us to linger with its traces and begs: Are we remembered by what endures, or by what disappears?