Nationality Filipino Occupation Artist | Name Marcel Antonio | |
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Born June 28, 1965 (age 58) ( 1965-06-28 ) Manila, Philippines Similar People Federico Aguilar Alcuaz, Pacita Abad, Benedicto Cabrera, Isidro Ancheta, Fabian de la Rosa | ||
Marcel antonio on gesture drawing part 1
Marcel Antonio (born June 28, 1965) is a Filipino painter. Considered as one of the most promising young talents in Philippine contemporary art while still attending the University of the Philippines' College of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, he launched a solo show and thereafter dropped out of the college to continue to produce collections of his distinctly narrative as well as pseudo-narrative figurative paintings influenced by modernism and 1980s postmodernism. Since then, he has produced enough sold-out works to be counted as one of the Philippines' young painters most proficient in the expressionist genre.
Contents
- Marcel antonio on gesture drawing part 1
- Life and work
- On originality quoting and the appropriation of themes and images
- Blue funk erotica and The Romantic Lie show
- Selected shows
- References
Since dropping out of college to concentrate on an already-budding profitable career, Antonio has continued to be considered by several galleries as a prize of collectors in the Manila art market. This market following has in turn granted him mainstream gallery success through an unending series of sold-out exhibitions courtesy of his art dealers.
Antonio's works involve a clear expressionism with mysterious themes, often utilizing fabular images that combine myth with reality, creating seeming stories behind his paintings that has continued to capture mainstream gallery-goers' attention.
In Manila, Antonio has exhibited at major galleries including Galleria Duemila, The Drawing Room, Gallery BIG, Glorietta Art Center, Galleria Quattrocento, and AltroMondo Arte Contemporanea where his following has included local and international collectors. He has also exhibited in Berlin, Australia and Singapore.
Life and work
Antonio is the son of Philippine painters Angelito Antonio and Norma Belleza and brother to painters Emil Antonio and Fatima Baquiran.
While still a sophomore in the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Antonio emerged as one of the school's "most promising" art students when he launched a solo exhibition. With that show, his professional career was quickly catapulted into the Manila market, and Antonio had to deal with the pressures of his studies while being enthused by already-burgeoning requests from art dealers.
By the time Antonio approached his forties in the late 1990s, he had already gone through a number of transitions in search of a signature art, all within the terms of figuration, centrally human figuration. He has in his art quoted mannerisms from both of his parents' works. In an interview, Antonio intimated: "I remember the times when my father would teach me how to draw a muscled man. I guess my passion for figures and storytelling comes from that."
Antonio's art creation is often inspired by various contemporary "mythologies", with the artist articulately stressing that his concept of mythology goes beyond the common Greek and Roman notion. He states: "Myth can be anything, just like what Joseph Campbell enunciated in The Power of Myth, where he discussed comparative mythology and the continuing role of myth in human society."
On originality, quoting and the appropriation of themes and images
On the issue of originality in art and quoting/appropriating, Antonio has said, "My father used to tell me to not be afraid to copy as it is the safest way to study. Even the masters did it. . . . Originality is a 19th-century idea that just won't die when right now there's really nothing that can be deemed totally original. Striving for originality in art is delusional. You can only do so much."
"Blue funk erotica" and The Romantic Lie show
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. The blog essay reviewed the achievements of the Filipino painter from the earlier years on to his latest 2010 show. The phrase-tag, which the critic posited in his art and culture blogsite A Party-Crashing Angle, instigated a dialogue between the artist and the critic, which culminated in a late-2011 series of paintings by Antonio. Antonio and de Veyra decided to collaborate on an early 2012 show using Antonio's new series, with the poet supplying 14 new poems for the show catalogue. De Veyra, being also an amateur painter who once studied in the same fine arts college as Antonio, also collaborated with Antonio on a five-painting series of shaped canvases for the show. The two titled the show "The Romantic Lie: Desire, Ennui, Anxiety".
Idealized as a face- and gestures-leaning figurative narrative art that avoids the "folk happiness" or "expressionism" of past and recent Philippine figurative art, de Veyra described Antonio's "blue funk erotica" or "trance erotica" as solely embracing the melancholic or otherwise the vexed expression. Touted as the subtle sort of fetish erotica that relies on the drama of melancholia instead of on pure eroticism as secret springboards for erotic imaginings, trance painting is deemed by de Veyra to have been culled from the art of Blue Period Picasso and Diego Velázquez, as much as from Raphael, Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Nobuyoshi Araki and the "defamiliarization" technique of the Russian Formalists.
In November 2014, Antonio joined de Veyra and painter Simkin de Pio in launching diskurso.com, a bimonthly art magazine online, for which he would act as publisher.
Selected shows
Solo shows
Selected group exhibitions