ABOUT THE WORK

It is always difficult to achieve anything genuinely new in art, but Marcel Antonio demonstrates that the impulse for the figurative in art continues, resulting in works that strongly hold their own among other art in the post-modern mainstream. Antonio’s style features colors that are not always contained within the boundaries of form, which adds to the magical atmosphere of the work as a whole. Alice Guillermo writes: “Although Marcel Antonio deals with Eros or sex, his images seem to imply an underlying opposition to traditional Puritanism that veils sex in mystery which may still prevail in some societies today. There are scenes of brothels, as in Casbah, Eden, and Metamorphosis, with the usual cubicles, madams and precautionary figures.” His reclining woman, with her sensuously swelling volumes and undulating contours, has a bold primitive vigor. A frequent strategy of the artist is placing one contrary element in a particular scene. This introduces a point of tension, a note contradicting the general mood, or a subverting element that punctures the basic premise of the work. For the viewer, it might be the woman seated, or the tamer presence of the birdcage. His ability to control detail and create areas of appealing color is evident in “Song of Desire (Diptych)”. Blue Funk Erotica or Trance Erotica was the art-critical term introduced by Filipino poet and critic V.I.S. de Veyra in a 2010 blog essay titled "Blue Funk'd Silent Stories" to describe Antonio's art. De Veyra described Antonio's "blue funk erotica" or "trance erotica" as solely embracing the melancholic or otherwise the vexed expression, a subtle sort of fetish erotica that relies on the drama of melancholia instead of on pure eroticism as secret springboards for erotic imaginings.