La-Familia Indio by Kyle Sarte is a compelling tale of toxic culture and how current day environments have become emotionally, mentally, and even physically harmful.

The 3ft x 4ft oil-on-canvas work, featured in the exhibition “Tayog-Tayog: The Ilonggo Imagination” at the Thrive Art Gallery, brings toxic culture into public discussion. It does so through the interplay of personal and familial experiences, examining interactions with both the extended family, the community, and workplace. 

A popular topic in today’s social discourse, especially on social media, “toxic culture” is used to describe negative behaviors in social groups. It flows in the everyday conversations in words like gaslighting, stonewalling, ghosting, or guilt-tripping, among others, and is even captured by the Filipino phenomenon “marites,” a humorous way of describing toxicity through gossiping and spreading rumors on the private affairs of people. Seriously, it sometimes results in spreading lies, misinformation, and disinformation, damaging one’s reputation and integrity. 

“My work reflects my earlier experiences with the family while the overall theme relates to families and communities in general. Toxic culture exists not only in our culture but also in other cultures and nationalities,” says Sarte, who has a fine arts background from the University of San Agustin.

Socio-cultural roots

Sarte used the title La-Familia Indio to introduce a colonial dimension on the origins of toxic culture, employing the term “indio” as a pejorative used by Spanish colonizers to describe the native Filipinos—a term that brings a socio-cultural labeling of the Filipino as an inferior race, which endured through time and left a lasting sense of inadequacy and negative self-perception.

“The piece attempts to connect toxic behavior to our being labeled an ‘indio’ back in the Spanish times,” explained Sarte. “Because if we take a deeper look into toxic culture, it is characterized by a lot of feelings of inferiority, inadequacies, or insufficiency; we have this perception that we are not enough as we are, and it demands that we can be more than ourselves.”

He shared that these tendencies and practices usually led to emotional distress resulting in unhealthy family dynamics with the children becoming alienated from their parents.

“Sometimes our acute internalization of the culture of respect for authority, especially for our elders and parents, has blurred the lines between control and autonomy, stifling our freedom to determine the direction of our lives, weakening our ability to mature as a person in the process, and attain a life of purpose,” says Sarte.

The artist himself was enmeshed with his family when his parents wanted him to pursue an architecture course, yet he wanted fine arts and to become an artist. 

“We have since moved on from this episode, but the experience had a long-lasting impact on me, especially with the perception that being an artist means a life that is financially unrewarding, no direction, unstable, meaningless, and in poverty, while architecture holds the promise of everything opposite to being an artist,” he expressed with relief due to family acceptance. 

A lot of artists have experienced emotional enmeshment, a type of toxic culture in the family where children exercise self-sacrifice as a conflict avoidance response even at the cost of personal happiness. However, decisions like this are said to often lead to burnout, resentment, and estrangement with parents.

Symbolic elements

Kyle Sarte’s use of horror vacui perfectly mirrors the overwhelming psychological state of its subject, where every inch of the canvas is consumed by intricate details, evoking a sense of suffocation, anxiety, and the relentless struggle to find order and peace in chaos.

The technique serves as a powerful metaphor, crowding the canvas with symbolic elements that capture the complexities and intricacies of toxic culture. The visual density of the composition offers a pictorial definition of horror vacui, which means “fear of empty spaces” in Latin, demonstrating normalization of toxic culture through family interaction or of shared conversation in community settings. The elaborate layering of the narrative in the grid creates a sense of entrapment and emotional burden.

Depicting the horror of toxicity is the focal point of the painting, showing a crucified self, tied by barbed wires and locked by the giant tentacles of an octopus. It brings to mind the impact of control and confusion provoked by the noise from family relatives and kin, as symbolized by the mouth spewing fire or venomous words through a python—facial expressions and gestural signals that nevertheless elicits sarcasm, disappointments, frustrations, anxiety, and despair.

In La-Familia Indio, Sarte captures the insidious ways toxic behaviors invade and distort familial and societal relationships, leaving no room for personal growth or genuine connection. Through this intense visual style, Sarte conjures the overwhelming force of negativity that permeates and perpetuates harmful cultural dynamics, suggesting that such behaviors, deeply rooted in history, continue to shape the present culture—spreading harm and eroding inner peace.

Toxic culture, especially in family settings, has also resulted in increasing estrangement of children from parents.

In Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents (The New Yorker, August 30, 2024), Anna Russel shared a 2019 Pillemer survey that shows that 27 percent of Americans are currently estranged from a relative, underscoring that if you haven’t experienced it yourself, you probably know someone who has.

Also read: The Art of Lester Amacio, a Traversal into the Inner Self

One of the reasons for “intentional distancing,” according to Kristina Scharp, director of the Family Communication and Relationships Lab at Rutgers University and Michigan State, is the “accumulation of grievances,” a fight or a disagreement between children and parents, or a negative relationship between at least two family members.

The painting of Sarte offers a glimpse of this societal and familial problem being confronted by thousands of people in silence. The work invites viewers to come out and to deal with it, showing the power of transparency through the artist’s raw emotion on canvas, hinting that its resolution also lies within, similar to the underlayers of his canvas—painted by plain color using softer and delicate strokes, an innate yet invisible humane side of the artist, revealing his ability to accept and forgive. 

The art of Kyle Sarte is more than just a portrayal of pain—it is an invitation to acknowledge, understand, and eventually transcend the toxicity that often impedes personal growth and interferes with happiness.