Born on 27 August 1978 into a family of artists, Maria Regina Coeli Manese did not receive any formal training in art and painting. Coeli primarily works with oil, acrylic, and mixed media, influenced by abstract expressionists Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, and Joan Mitchell. Her early works are marked with pain and anguish as she struggled through a spiritual dry spell, finding her way back to God. Coming out of this dark period, Coeli decided to start sharing her newer paintings with the public. She has had a number of exhibits across Metro Manila since 2018. Her style is ever-evolving, each painting a result of deep reflection and prayer. Coeli sees art as worship and seeks to bring people into her world – a place where suffering is real but joy and peace are available in Jesus.

Simplified forms germinate from a reductive and gentle geometry that eschews the hard-edge rigidity of minimalist art – just such a stillness that brings to mind the mystical lyricism of Mark Rothko, the American Abstract Expressionist. Manese constructs architecturally, solid tableaux of flat, undifferentiated planes and surfaces that often allude to horizons and perspectives, evocate of landscapes surely, but stripped of references to verdant fields and vegetation. In their underpinnings, they are classical structures. A technically oriented painter, Coeli Manese calibrates her cool and elegant walls of light with her intuitive predilection for ashen gray, subdued brown, tan and beige.