Angelito Antonio celebrates the gritty moods and seasons of the marketplace in this work. He pictorializes the bustle of the early morning probably before the buyers arrive. The artist paints views of it that are jubilees of summer colors. The cool and weighty formal arrangements began to disintegrate as colors became more intense, the surface more agitated, and for the first time since the 1860s, the character of the subject itself accounted for something.
Like Picasso, Angelito Antonio’s art insists that it cannot be wholly abstract, in the sense of a non-objective or non-representational work of art, it follows that he did not so much abstract from the actual as make actual what had previously been real only as a passionate apprehension. The almost frenzied use of pure tones announced a new turn of mind and revealed both a rebellion against all conventions and a reappraisal of the art of painting. In a style which is representational but yet Cubist, Antonio is concerned with conveying the essence of people engaged in labor in the marketplace; of note is the man carrying a heavy load which recalls Victorio Edades' groundbreaking 1928 masterpiece The Builders. The entire work is executed in the technique of overlapping, strongly colored planes, colliding and intersecting but not interpenetrate, and their movement defines no static still-life situation but communicates the restless pace of market life.
Provenance: Private Collection, Manila