Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

With over five decades of works, Angelito Antonio has produced Cubist works that celebrate Filipino identity and culture. His style was influenced heavily by his mentor at the UST, Vicente Manansala. Just like Manansala, Antonio would render vendors of various kinds of local goods, cockfighters, mother and child, and other folk urban images. What sets his works apart from those of his mentor is a more apparent tension between figuration and abstraction brought about by more angular and sharper figurations. Critic Cid Reyes also noted that Antonio’s sense of colorism is more adventurous and daring than Manansala’s. Among the contemporaries of Antonio as an emerging artist in the 1960s who produced urban folk genre art were Antonio Austria and Mario Parial. Vendors reveals Antonio’s unique approach to stylized figuration of daring scale and proportions made more striking by a modernist flair distinctly his. Various images such as the candle vendor playing the guitar, the woman vendor under an umbrella, and a set of crucifixes evoke a narrative quality to the 1988 piece. Here, Antonio also utilizes the expressive properties of color. A typical scene becomes more poetic and charming through linear clarity, distinct cubist technique, and signature washed out tones.