We’re in the Business of Hope
14 September–12 October 2024
Art Director
Silvana Ancellotti-Diaz
Gallery Manager
Álvaro Talavera
Exhibition Team
Thess Ponce
Roy Abrenica
Mariela Araza
Edgar Bautista
Gabriel Abalos
Jose Joeffrey Baba
Daena Dizon
Exhibition Notes
Raul Rodriguez
Copyright © 2024 Galleria Duemila, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system transmitted in any form by any means without the written consent of the above mentioned copyright holder, with the exceptional reasonably brief excerpts and quotation used in articles, critical essays, or research.
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Creatures on Landscape 1
collage of old paintings on canvas
152.00 x 136.00 cm / 59.89 x 53.58 in.
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Creatures on Landscape 2
collage of old paintings on acrylic canvas
152.00 x 136.00 cm / 59.89 x 53.58 in.
2024
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Homage to H. Matisse’s “Poppy Flowers” cut outs from old acrylic paintings on paper
Dimensions vary
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Homage to H. Matisse’s “Poppy Flowers” cut outs from old acrylic paintings on paper
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Homage to H. Matisse’s “Poppy Flowers” cut outs from old acrylic paintings on paper
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Gestalt in Reverse: Understanding the Recent Ramon Manuel “RM” de Leon
by Raul Rodriguez
I’m always in wonderment as to what and where all this activity of painting can lead me when everything is said and done. —RM de Leon
Thirty-six years ago, in May 1988, Ramon Manuel “RM” de Leon flew to Germany along with six Filipino artists to wall-carpet a section of Raab Gallery in Berlin with his distinct acrylic drawings on vellum. Painted with bold black outlines, human figures emerge and merge with undefined backgrounds engulfed in fauvist colors. This Manila-Berlin Exchange project, launched by the once-renowned Pinaglabanan Galleries, catapulted the art career of RM to a momentum of constant stylistic innovations still unsurpassed today by fellow contemporary artists. Perhaps swept by the zeitgeist of the 1980s by the likes of Keith Haring’s subway chalk figures, RM’s version is less graffiti-like, but they tee off to a language of representation akin to the misshapen human bodies rendered by Francis Bacon (before his swirls of anatomical distortions) and Georg Baselitz (before his inverted formats), especially in their early paintings depicting Van Gogh trudging on a country dust road.
Looking back, what remains in the oeuvre of RM is the persistence of representing his protagonists with dark outlines in flayed motions, which has been a defining trademark of his. As his main arsenal, lines as a vehicle of differentiation have constantly transformed his selected subjects into objects of formal tension and comedic release. Works that show Bambi grazing on a prairie where, afar, the horizon rises an atomic mushroom cloud, or when a jostling of dissected parts of Disney cartoon characters slices through an even harmony in a composition all seem to indicate that RM is more concerned with questioning an accessible reading of a genre like Pop Art than settling for a quick-fix cueing of a style.
Fast forward to 2024: RM had matured considerably from a period of poking fun at the rules of perspective, when size differentiations of objects in the foreground had become ambiguous as the depth of field was arbitrarily violated. Take, for instance, those appropriated images of characters lifted from children’s storybooks, of which his copy-paste technique could sit comfortably with the “uncanny imaging and ambiguous handling of forms” of Neo Rauch (artnet. com). This dexterity in breaking the laws of representation of observed reality has brought us to this present game of visual trickery, at the precipice of simplification and/or complexity. Either RM pushes the game of simplifying the stack of elements he’ll deploy to compose an art piece uncluttered by static, or he’ll stack the disparate elements he gathered, lumped together as a ghetto of irreconcilable meanings similar to a Dada collage. After four decades, arriving at an indispensable stratagem of either/or dynamics of tension and release that usually happens in a single work attests that RM has gone full circle in untiring artmaking, which enabled his painterly elocutions to go overboard and swim in uncharted waters that often surprise his viewers.
Thanks to Gestalt psychology, we can read art—and in this case, RM’s art configurations—in comprehensible terms. Thrown also in his cauldron of methodologies, this strategy called collage, whether through the lens of Kurt
Schwitters’s form breakdowns or from his mentor Roberto Chabet’s process of randomly gluing torn pages together (China Collage series), could furnish us cues for an interpretative reading of an RM work via the rules of making Gestalt work for art. At present, the imagery employed by RM is either a truncation of a recognizable body part, superimposed by a gestural brushstroke ripped from a previous painting and mixed in a stew of chaotic abandon, only to set a copy-paste fragment spinning out of cognizance. Sometimes, a pair of eyes would peek through a storm of colors, or a smear of mauve residues suggests a transgression had taken place, or adroitly implies a hidden narrative behind his “useless machines” series, devoid of function—may assume themselves as clues to a puzzle by using Gestalt as an aid for visual reasoning.
Gestalt, originally a German term, means “a unified whole,” of making a picture whole by understanding its parts. Gestalt presumes the onlooker as a detective walking into an art gallery “into a scene full of chaos. Instead of being overwhelmed, the detective investigates and catches specific small details to discover what occurred. Generally speaking, they are creating order and organization out of specific elements among the disordered scene using Gestalt principles” (Knedler, Art History Reader: Gestalt Theory [sartle.com]). These principles of Gestalt organization, “enhanced by our innate tendencies to constellate” either by “similarity grouping” or “proximity grouping” (Wertheimer, 1923), can help us comprehend art as “the poetry of sight” (Whistler, 1878). Poetry indeed, because how do we make heads or tails of an RM painting? Well, we do not! If this psychology of sight is “based in the mind rather than simply what is physically in front of us” (Knedler), to read between the lines in an RM artwork is to allow the mind to inspect the interplay of compositional variables as individual notes, like in music, to determine if the whole picture is cohesive or not. Therefore, the fragments dictate the behavior of seeing the whole picture. As viewers attempt to piece together a cohesive unit in our mind’s eye, we then try the opposite action: We don’t integrate the elements but fragment the whole. That’s Gestalt in reverse. That’s how a viewer appreciates the recent RM de Leon.
The strategy of abstracting the representational, as proven by the countertrajectories of RM, could move the scales to two separate diametrical directions in order to apply a Gestalt solution in deciphering his recent works. To understand his art as one integral whole would force the argument towards oversimplification, so as to facilitate the viewer in getting a better grip of its complexity. But doing one’s homework well of “gestalting” a seemingly cluttered canvas, for instance, would tempt us to decide to turn it into a deft caricature of sorts. In today’s commercial verbiage, this is also known by its marketing device called branding. Getting comfy to settle for an easy-recall stylistic identity is a byproduct of a branding process. Artists are known by a singular unique style, and this sets us up as a kind of merch on a cashier counter. Yet on the creative side of artmaking, inspiration here grows thin and pale. The predictable style comes to a dead-end predicament. It may be lucrative, but we find ourselves in a backyard industry scavenging for novelties, at worst, for gimmicks. Sad to say, a myopic stylization buries itself to oblivion, forgotten like a museum corpse.
On the other hand, Gestalt in reverse chooses the opposite extraordinary act— to leap into a maelstrom of complexity. For example, Philip Guston took the unpopular route of painting clumsy images of Ku Klux Klan men, mounds of shoes, and bedside smokers during the era of Abstract Expressionism in 1950s America. It is not an easy hand-to-glove truce because reversing the natural tendency of style slouching on public approval isn’t the cup of tea for an artist of complexity. On the contrary, he would rather grab his bootstraps tight and proceed to trudge in a territory of shameless stylelessness, and from that self-effacing position, as history attests about art mavericks, they inevitably
would soon give birth to monsters we mistakenly branded as Cubists, paint drippers, and misfits. RM reverts the neat pigeonholing of the Gestalt method, and by sleight of hand, we reach a tentative conclusion: To understand art is to understand art anew from ground zero. Maybe this idea of randomness as an open structure, unheard of by most Gen Z’s, could be the next big thing.
RM often brings to mind the advice of Kara Walker, as he repeatedly emphasizes before his St. Benilde art students take this challenge from this American postcolonial artist: “If you can have the ability to paint a picture of the world before you with precision, without add-ons or pluses or minuses, then you’re a good artist.” Reflexive of RM’s recent body of works presented in Galleria Duemila, what kind of world does RM represent in his art? It is a Gestalt representation (or abstraction) in reverse that unfolds a world we do not like to see, filled with earth tones. Herewith, life in all its complexities teems at its fragile seams: the blood of wars, news of genocide, of empty glee reverberating on a stretched linen. These wild, garish colors and image dismemberments are mere art masks that hide the truth. Atop life’s brackish-brown splatter of vanities, a slow dawn of hope arises, and this will arise in order to reveal the precise world one can find when art is, after all, “... in the business of hope.”
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About Ramon Manuel “RM”de Leon
Education
1979–1984, University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts, Major in Painting
Awards and Distinctions
1983–present, Teacher and Coordinator for the Children’s Summer Art Workshops, Phil-Am Village, Quezon City
1990, Thirteen Artists Awardee, CCP, Manila
1997, First Filipino Awardee of the Vermont Studio Center Studio Arts Program for Painting, Vermont, U.S.A.
Solo Exhibitions
2024, We’re in the Business of Hope, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2023, Blind Hope, Willful Ignorance... (The State We’re In), Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2023, Urgent, Rare & Shameless, Underground Gallery, Makati City 2022, Fed by Algorithms, Finale Art File, Makati City
2021, Human, Nature & Industry, Finale Art File, Makati City 2018, SEX: Unbridled Works on Paper (From the Vaults), Archivo Gallery, Makati City 2017, One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure, West Gallery, Quezon City 2017, Art Fair Philippines 2017 (Archivo Gallery), The Link, Makati City 2017, No Plans, Archivo Gallery, Makati City
2014, Go Ahead!... Enjoy Looking at Us!, West Gallery, Quezon City 2013, Beyond 18 Inches, Artinformal, Mandaluyong City 2013, Gallery VASK Inaugural Show, Clipp House Center, Taguig City 2011, Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative, Altromondo Arte Contemporanea, Makati City 2010, Recent Paintings, Altromondo Arte Contemporanea, Makati City 2007, West Gallery, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 2006, Between Structure and Gesture, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2005, Anomalous, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 2004, Emotional Landscapes, West Gallery, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 2004, Cute Can Get Ugly, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 2004, Part I The Stamps Series 2004, Part II The First Paintings 2003, Academic, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 2002, Fun!, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 2002, Pretty Strange, West Gallery, Glorietta, Makati City 2001, Wrong Pictures, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 2000, More Readings Between the Lines, West Gallery, Glorietta, Makati City 2000, Between the Lines, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 2000, Seven Easy Pieces, Finale Art File, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1999, Landscapes, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1998, Parodies of The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb by Gorky and Other Paintings, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City
1998, Seeing Gorky, Brix Gallery, Makati City
1998, New Paintings, West Gallery, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1997, New & Unexhibited Works, Lopez Museum, Ortigas Center, Pasig City
1996, Silhouettes: Recent Paintings, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City
1996, Wallbound, Ayala Museum, Makati City
1995, Recent Paintings, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City
1995, Recent Drawings, The Crucible Gallery, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1994, Paradigms Cont’d, West Gallery, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1994, Paradigms, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1994, Drawings on Paper, The Crucible Gallery, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1993, Caricatures, West Gallery, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1993, New Works, Lopez Museum, Pasig City
1993, Inaugural Show, Metro Gallery, San Juan City
1992, Actual Painting Activity: New Works on Paper, Lopez Museum, Pasig City
1991, Idols, Finale Art File, Makati City
1990, Still Life and Others, Alliance Française de Manille, Makati City
1990, Attitude and Form, Alliance Française de Manille and Finale Art File, Makati City
1989, Luna (Main Gallery), CCP, Manila
1988, R.M. de Leon: Recent Works, Finale Art File
1987, R.M. de Leon: Drawings, Finale Art File
1984–1986, Consistent Participation in the Annual Shows of CCP and its local invitational shows, traveling group exhibition, On Board the Ship Pearl Scandinavia, in Cooperation with the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines
1985, Random Pages: The Magazine, La Tasca’s Grille Room
1983, Individual Exhibition of Monotypes, CCP, Manila
Group Exhibitions
2024, FREE FALL (curated by Raul Rodriguez), Altro Mondo Galleries, Makati City 2023, Commissioned by Solaire Group of Companies, Solaire Casino, Quezon City 2022, It’s Casual Entertainment: We Aim to Please, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2018, An Italian in Manila, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2016, They Speak to You by Association, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2015, Art Fair Philippines 2015, The Link, Makati City 2014, Tribute (exhibitions for the Late Roberto Chabet), CCP, Manila 2014, Hoodwink (commissioned by Homme et Femme Proprietors), SM Aura, Taguig City 2014, Manilart 2014, SMX Convention Center, SM Aura, Taguig City 2014, A Tribute to Life and Death, Art Fair Philippines 2014, The Link, Makati City 2013, Placebo Paintings, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2013, The Art of Rediscovering, Manilart 2013, SMX Convention Center, Taguig City 2013, Obsession and Fetishes, Clipp House Center, Taguig City 2011, Une Pléiade d’Artistes: Recent Works, Altromondo Arte Contemporaneo, Makati City 2011, Pretty on the Inside, Silverlens, Makati City 2008, Fiction/Non-Fiction, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2007, Nostalgia Is Not What It Used to Be, Mag Gallery, Quezon City 2007, Figuring, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City
2006, Specific Gravities 2, Galleria Duemila, Pasay City 2005, On Paper, Mag Gallery, The Loop at ABS-CBN, Quezon City 2000, Recent Drawings, The Drawing Room, Makati City
1997, Modern Art, Galleria Duemila, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City
1995, Recent Works, Finale Art File, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City
1993, Big Works, Finale Art File, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City 1993, Recent Works, Art Center, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City
1993, Facts & Faces, CCP, Manila
1991, Dan Raralio/RM de Leon: Sculptures and Paintings, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City
1990, Two-man exhibition with Jun Dominguez, Finale Art File, Makati City
1990, Four Artists in Iloilo, Iloilo City
1990, New Works, Finale Art File, Manila
1989, Banaag: Currents in Philippine Art, Bulwagang Juan Luna, CCP, Manila
1988, Manila-Berlin Exchange Exhibit, Raab Gallery (under the Auspices of Pinaglabanan Gallery), West Germany
1988, I Am a Cream Doughnut: A Multi-Media Reaction to Berlin, CCP, Manila
1988, Paintings and Sculptures (three-man exhibition with Dan Raralio and Marcel Antonio), Alliance Française de Manille, Makati City
1987, Philippine representative, Third Biennial in Bangladesh sponsored by the United Nations; shared top award with Gerardo Tan, also of the Philippines Just Thought I’d Stop for a Bottle of Beer, Kulay Diwa Gallery
1986, Objects & Spaces, Pinaglabanan Galleries, Manila
1985, Six Artists in Subic, Naval Base, Subic Bay
1984, Peking Preview, Beijing, with preview exhibition at CCP, Manila
1983, Selected Prints, CCP, Manila
1982, Sining Kamalig, Sining Kamalig (first four-man exhibition with Gerardo Tan, Raul Rodriguez, and Teresa Balatbat), Manila
Acknowledgements
The artist would like to thank the following individuals who have taken the time to help him create this show. Without their assistance, this show would have been much more difficult to bring to life:
Many thanks to the talented Ms. Janine Vargas, one of my best former students whose invaluable assistance has brought some of the artworks to life in this show. Your talent is highly regarded and well recommended for future projects. I hope we can collaborate again soon. I thank you deeply.
To my best friends, Marion and Raffy Limbo of Boon Prints. Without your assistance in the production methods for my artworks, it would have taken much longer to complete. Your technological and graphic support has been superb!
To Mr. Raul Rodriguez, my classmate, seatmate, buddy, and colleague in the art scene, for accepting the offer to write about the works for this show—thank you for your deep research and for sharing your scholastic ability to this well written insights about the works. Maraming salamat, kapatid.
And to Mr. Lito Roxas, my framer for many years, thank you for always being there to handle the delicate framing of my works. It has been many moons of great framing under your care. Maraming salamat muli.
Galleria Duemila was established in 1975 by Italian born Silvana Ancellotti-Diaz. Duemila means “twentieth century” and it was this vision that inspired Duemila’s advocacy in promoting and preserving Philippine contemporary art. To date, it is the longest-standing commercial art gallery in the Philippines maintaining a strong international profile. With the vision to expose its artists locally and within the ASEAN region, Duemila complements its exhibits with performances, readings, and musical events in its custom-built gallery in Pasay City, Metro Manila.
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