Marcel Antonio's new statement at the Yuchengco Museum
In July of 2010, I posted a
blog essay on the art of Marcel Antonio titled “Blue Funk’d Stories: The Expanding Art of Marcel Antonio” and coined the phrase-tag Blue Funk Erotica for Antonio’s art. I
described Blue Funk Erotica as 1) unsmiling faces-derived figurative drama
(primarily portraiture, then), 2) replete of appropriations or art-historical
quotes, 3) suggestive (but only suggestive) of a narrative, 4) quasi-rebellious
towards rigid allusions and painting titles’ guidance, 5) unpainterly “expressionist,” 6) of an in-a-trance mood as against a happy one, and 7)
conscriptive of the painting viewer as peeper. “This erotica should stay around
and keep us entranced,” I wrote, “being not so much one that
tickles the groin as the kind that promotes the understanding that every face,
gesture, object, color, and shape is a secret sex object and clandestine true
story waiting to be told.” But also debunking a previous simplistic tag on
Antonio’s art as “narrative expressionist,” I wrote: “In Antonio’s case,
his blue funkism's ‘de-expression’, or ‘dis-expression’ and narrative confusion
through the mannerisms of narrative imagery and titling, seems to be a produce
of a Russian Formalist narrative bent on ‘defamiliarizing’ images and shapes
towards a higher enigma. Thus his refusal to ‘express’.”
The abovementioned blog started a
dialogue between Antonio’s art as well as intent (of unintent) and my reading, culminating in a late-2011 production of a collection titled “The
Romantic Lie: Desire, Ennui, Anxiety” which shall be shown this coming February
at the Yuchengco Museum.
This title for Antonio’s new series
does not so much signal a change in his art’s direction as clarify where my reading is right and where it needs to be tweaked. For instance, while
I opt for a Barthesian “variety of narrative possibilities,” Antonio’s
pragmatic knowledge of his audience allows/welcomes two basic approaches to his
art.
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| The White Ribbon |
The one approach favors rigid
symbolist readings, especially as Antonio is himself attracted to the
“monumental” (Antonio’s term) figure common among utopian-art compositions (e.g., Wagnerian glorifications, classical idealism, Nazi art, Stalinist totalitarian
art, socialist realism, etc.) and advertising art imagery or the various idealizations of soft porn.
But, for the other approach, Antonio
acknowledges that I am right about his own efforts to
frustrate, so to speak, all symbolist and narrative approaches, via
experimentation with juxtapositions/relations and eclectic allusions. These
experimentation, appropriations, and art-history quotes result in a
dehumanized atmosphere, involving such stuff as machine aesthetics (steampunk, etc.) and the usual
facial expressions of ennui and boredom, all moving towards Antonio’s intended
postmodernist multiplicity of meanings. But the final result on each single
canvas is an invite to a pseudo-narrative half-aware of this pseudo-ness, welcoming
while parodying the various cultural and moral significations possible to
professional and popular semiotics.
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| Ars Poetica |
In this sense, Antonio’s art would be
self-described as anxious about the unknown, desirous of knowledge as a matter
of course but likewise celebrating the ennui of knowledge’s elusivity, even the
charm of that ennui itself alone. Ennui as both springboard and object of
desire, then, visually fulfilled or illustrated on an Antonio-esque drama
field.
A final stamp to this anti-narrative
effort to “recover the sensation of life” (Victor Shklovsky) is the artist’s
devotion to the coloration of Diego Velรกzquez (recreator of the classics) or Chagall (dreamy Chagall) as
well as to the latent abstract geometrics beneath all his pseudo-narrative
stagings.
I shall join Antonio in this
exhibit with fourteen new poems in the exhibition catalog. Antonio also invited me to fill a curved wall he refused to use with my own paintings as the show's guest paintings. For which wall I did three shaped canvases, for a collaborative five-painting project with
Antonio as counter-instigated by me. [END]
