At the ArtistSpace of Ayala Museum is Antonio Catral Leaño’s Descendants of Eden. Organized by Pinto Art Museum, the exhibit showcases Leaño’s latest creative foray into what he calls as “digital collage,” presenting, in surprising juxtapositions, appropriated photographs, maps, and scientific illustrations as well as painterly strokes to create searing narratives on the aspects of selfhood. A major daily’s review of his previous show, East of Eden, calls the works “a multi-layered map; a generative system of signs; a palimpsest of text, images, gestural interventions and illustrations waiting to be deciphered.”
On the heels of the success of East of Eden held at the Pinto Art Museum last year, Leaño continues to raise crucial questions on the origin of mankind, plumbing historical, biological, and artistic depths to reveal, at once, deep-seated fragmentation and intractable wholeness, ruptures and continuations, departures and returns. For Leaño, as descendants of Eden, we are inherently migratory, spreading across the four corners of the world, carrying our cargo of inheritance. This cargo is something we bear on the cellular level: the notion of good and evil, the impulse to create as well as destroy.
As one of the leading practitioners engaging social awareness through the language of various media, Leaño has always been on the lookout for points of connection between the individual and history, between history composed of various players and the story of mankind as a collective.
On view until April 5, Descendants of Eden is but a continuation of Leaño’s pursuit in defining the essential, unchanging qualities of the self against the background of the mutable postmodern and post-colonial conditions.
ArtistSpace of Ayala Museum is on Makati Avenue corner De la Rosa Street, Greenbelt Park, Makati City.
For inquiries on the exhibit, email [email protected]. or contact Jenny Villanueva of Pinto Art Museum at 0927-7646270.– Carlomar Arcangel Daoana