Provenance: Artinformal

ABOUT THE WORK

Part of the second generation of social realism in the 1990’s, Antonio Leaño contemplates on the motivations of the character Simoun, the aggrieved protagonist of El Filibusterismo authored by Jose Rizal titled after a page from a Filipino translation of the novel pasted on the canvas. Simoun is portrayed by Rizal as a vengeful man seeking retribution for the injustices brought upon him, and plans a massive explosion during the wedding reception whose guests are of the colonial elite through the flicker of an oil lamp. Simoun however fails in his planned explosion, and dies escaping from the authorities. In this work, Leaño depicts the famed triumvirate photograph of Rizal and his fellow propagandists Marcelo H. Del Pilar and Mariano Ponce and stenciled on wood. In the same manner that Simoun failed in planned uprising in the novel, Leaño inverses the image of the propagandists as a symbolism of the failure of their reformist agenda for equal rights of Filipinos under the patronage for Spain. But the artist uses the same analogy as a reflection of our contemporary history on the failures of previous governments under foreign powers represented by the Commonwealth tax stamp and a Mickey Mouse banknote from the Japanese occupation and subsequent republican administrations portrayed by a modern day stamp in replaying the frequent message of change and progress but that has since fallen short, on deaf ears.