The Power of Story

Marcel Antonio's Sturm und Drang takes inspiration from a world of literary greats.

BY REUBEN RAMAS CAÑETE

Image: Detail of "A Mad Gleam", 2008, Oil on canvas, 48x48 inches

Courtesy of Imelda Uy

The Power of Story

Marcel Antonio is a firm believer of the possibilities of traditional allegories and metaphors in addressing contemporary issues and themes. A scion of artistic parents (both father Angelito Antonio and mother Norma Belleza are famed Filipino Figurative Expressionists who came of age in the Sixties), the younger Antonio grew up in a household where aesthetic debates and art flowed easily from the crib to the living room sofa. Antonio’s fine arts education at the esteemed University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman also furthered his intellectual curiosity by interlinking avant-garde conceptual theories with more traditional genre painting practices. This bore fruit starting in the 1990s with his distinctive paintings of lovers and interiors suffused with the alienation and alterity of the modern everyday.

Having as his artistic forebears the London school of Expressionists, such as Francis Bacon and Ron B. Kitaj, Marcel Antonio looks at the impact that culture has made on contemporary human life, and how the act of storytelling in paint transforms human existence into a weighty transgression with mythology and history. In Sturm und Drang, Antonio’s most recent series of paintings dwell on this ability of telling stories that contain double meanings, hidden clues, and multiple interpretations. Using as his source of inspiration the classic tradition of English literature, in particular the plays of William Shakespeare or the novels of Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, Antonio imbues his paintings with a dense set of multiple signifiers that play upon his long-standing interest in semiotics—the science of signs. Antonio’s ability to artistically interpret and redirect the meanings of these stories is aimed at addressing contemporary audiences with the drama of the original text. This strategy also allows Antonio to add or conflate different levels of interpretation to these stories based on his ability to play off and re-identify the actors of this textual but now painted stage, which are, after all, metaphors for a more general human condition.

GRAB YOUR COPY OF THE CURRENT ISSUE OF CONTEMPORARY ART PHILIPPINES TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.