ABOUT THE WORK

A product of the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts who began his artistic career in the early 1980s, R.M. de Leon has recently seen a quiet resurgence as his works, that hew closely to the tenets of post-modernism, capture the zeitgeist. In this painting, we see the elements from different movements quoted, juxtaposed, and remixed: from the lineation of the conceptual artists to the varying washes of color-field abstractionists, to the illustrative samples that seem to have been drawn from comics. Together, they create a maelstrom of cacophonous activity, frustrating the viewer’s default investigation of coherent narrative and instead presenting a multifarious perspective of an actively shifting terrain. A katipunero astride on a galloping horse, a leaping hare, a warren of lines: the painting is all motion and strife, revealing how figuration can be pushed to the extreme and result in reverberating complexity.