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

ABOUT THE WORK

I n pursuit of an artistic career in the 1980s, Marcel Antonio had ceased his studies at the UP College of Fine Arts soon after his debut solo exhibition. Since then, Antonio would go on to carve himself a niche in the contemporary Manila gallery scene for his dreamlike post-expressionist works. While his paintings evoke hints of the playfully figurative modernist styles, there is also a deeply postmodern and magical realist charge in the themes of myth and reality that the artist often takes on. In Marcel Antonio’s The Little Prince, one gleans a subdued sense of fancy. A seated young boy holds a small toy plane in one hand in a room that seems to be a sala. He wears a neutrally youthful expression, eyes carrying a subtle wonder in them, matched within the composition only by the allure of the pink rose that sits beside him. The view behind the young man draws the eye next amongst the warm reds and oranges of the room with its mysterious deep blue, defining only the shapes of a fox, a baobab tree, and a glimmer in the sky. Lastly and curiously, a snake slithers in the shade of the boy’s chair, its presence suspicious and unassuming. Each of these references narrative elements from French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel of the same name, in which the narrator, a pilot whose plane had crashed into the Sahara, meets the little prince, a young boy who struggled to grasp the dull and obsessively pragmatic world of adults and lamented the love he had for a rose who had taken advantage of his kindness. In a cosmos that seemed to be too fixated on its own worldly interests, the little prince is wondrously ruminative, but also lonely. Antonio’s depiction of The Little Prince seems to capture this exact feeling in the quiet tensions at play in his painting: in between solid warmths and mystic blues, in the boy’s expression that teeters somewhere between solemnity and whimsy, in between objects fancy and mundane, and in between what seems real and what seems not. (Pie Tiausas)