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

ABOUT THE WORK

Marcel Antonio's works situate themselves in the inbetween of things—between mind and matter, reality and illusion. In contrast to the collective activity of folk subjects in the works of his parents Norma Belleza and Angelito Antonio, Marcel Antonio is driven towards introspections on the psyche, or reflections of an inner "folklore," if you will. The figures in Antonio’s works are curious, often bearing stone-like faces that wear eerily beguiling expressions, as in the pair rendered in this piece. There is an enchanting quality to the textured use of dreamy blues to paint shadows on the moon-bathed skin of lovers, a stark contrast to the stylized distortion of folk figures we see in Norma Belleza and Angelito Antonio’s often festively extroverted works. In Marcel Antonio’s pieces, we instead see an introverted softness, dream-like and sensual—and always at the same time surreal as some things appear poetically out of place. If his works strike the viewer with a sense of something being just a little off or odd, then perhaps that is simply the work of Antonio’s sleight of hand, momentarily jarring the viewer’s reality with what is unreal. Carl Jung writes of dreams as impartial and spontaneous products of the inner psyche, the unconscious slipping momentarily into one's consciousness. If this is so, then perhaps the illusory worlds Marcel Antonio conjures are just a little more than what they appear: the truth of reality itself, a proof of the living human spirit, just as it is. (Pie Tiausas)