León Gallery wishes to thank the artist for confirming the authenticity of this lo

Exhibited: ManilART 2014, Endangered Visions (Group Exhibition), Bonifacio Global City, Taguig, October 15 - 19, 2014

ABOUT THE WORK

Making its debut at the ManilArt fair in 2014, the lot at hand is a work by Marcel Antonio shown at the international group exhibition entitled ‘Endangered Visions’ curated by Cabanatuan-based artist Gromyko Semper. In his exhibition notes, Semper describes the group show as such: “Endangered Visions aims to invigorate art with the unique, the rare, and the original: exploring the innermost exotic, mystical and magical recesses of the mind… seeks to counterbalance an art world driven by a rapacious market with something more contemplative, subtle and challenging.” In this work called The Censors, Marcel Antonio presents a dreamlike eccentricity typical of his paintings, but curiously composes the scene with a rigid austerity. Gone are the soft whimsical blues and lethargically blissful faces, now replaced by dark austerely muted hues as well as starker and grim-looking expressions. With all elements arranged in a labyrinthine composition, Antonio maintains the eccentric character of his works, but instead of typically reveling in its bizarre other-ness, the image arrests its own eccentricity—or in other words, it ‘endangers’ it. The visual effect is thus a sense of trapped indulgence within the odd labyrinth of the artist’s own making. Antonio’s paintings are usually situated in a space of fantastic in-between, and the same is true for this work. In The Censors, however, Antonio depicts such a space as endangered, seemingly caught in between figures of indulgence and authority as the bizarre struggles to come to its fullest. (Pie Tiausas)