We're in the Business of Hope - Updated by Galleria Duemila Art

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

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COP - 20397

The Tree Trunk acrylic on canvas

150.00 x 111.00 cm / 59.10 x 43.73 in. 2024

COP - 20399

Red Hills Landscape

collage of old paintings on acrylic canvas

136.00 x 152.20 cm / 53.58 x 59.97 in. 2024

COP - 20403

Collage with Cotton & Lace outside Picture Frame paintings, acrylic, lace, white fax hari on paper

91.44 x 60.96 cm / 36.03 x 24.02 in.

COP - 20398

Creatures on Landscape 1

collage of old paintings on canvas

152.00 x 136.00 cm / 59.89 x 53.58 in.

2024

COP - 20400

Creatures on Landscape 2

collage of old paintings on acrylic canvas

152.00 x 136.00 cm / 59.89 x 53.58 in.

2024

COP - 20401

On Its Way to the Trash 1 oil on canvas

121.00 x 146.50 cm / 47.67 x 57.72 in.

COP - 20402

On Its Way to the Trash 2 oil on canvas

121.00 x 146.50 cm / 47.67 x 57.72 in.

COP - 20424

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Homage to H. Matisse’s “Poppy Flowers” cut outs from old acrylic paintings on paper

Dimensions vary

2024

- 20425

COP

COP-20417

COP - 20418

COP - 20426

COP - 20423

COP - 20411

Homage to H. Matisse’s “Poppy Flowers” cut outs from old acrylic paintings on paper

Dimensions vary 2024

COP - 20414

COP - 20412

COP - 20416

COP - 20413

COP - 20428

COP - 20415

COP - 20421

COP - 20429

Homage to H. Matisse’s “Poppy Flowers” cut outs from old acrylic paintings on paper

Dimensions vary 2024

COP - 20420

COP - 20422

COP - 20427

COP - 20419

COP - 20430

COP - 20431

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.”