{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":37234,"auction_id":48,"set_id":76,"lot_number":"106","artist":"R.M De Leon (b.1960)","title":"Untitled","starting_price":100000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower right)","medium":"mixed media","size":"48” x 60” (122 cm x 152 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private Collection, Manila","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"“I live in a box,” says painter RM de Leon. “I have no studio. My place is small. If I have to do some painting, I just push everything around and work. If I have to do a large piece, I just drag everything to my relatives’ place a walking-distance away and work on my cousin’s veranda. It’s like artists in Japan, their space is so small yet they create huge pieces.”   This is typical thinking of someone who had been mentored by Roberto Chabet, prime exponent of Conceptual Art in the country. De Leon may live in a box but he lives free, and no box can contain or confine his ideas. “We know shoes should be in pairs, but who says one cannot be white while the other is red?” he asks rhetorically. There’s no focal point and one can’t tell which is right or left, up or down — total freedom, art unbound. This is characteristic of many of RM de Leon’s artworks, which are all-around paintings.   De Leon received the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1990. He was the first Filipino recipient of the Vermont Studio Center scholarship for Studio Arts program in Painting. De Leon was for the most part mentored Roberto Chabet, prime exponent of Conceptual Art in the country. “Bobby was like a Zen master,” De Leon reflects on his late mentor Chabet. “He taught me how to behave. Maybe he felt I was too loud, talkative, and boastful. I cannot really tell what I was to him. Bobby and I used to go swimming every morning; we’d do lapping. Some thought I was a Chabet boy, but I wasn’t really a groupie. May pagkasutil din ako. For the most part, I was absent in his group shows.” He reveals his mentor’s last text message to him before he died in 2013: “RM, you have a very good instinct. Follow it. And stop reading Clement Greenberg.” Chabet was referring to the leading critic of modern art, champion of the avant-garde and kitsch, abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction — whose ideas had obsessed De Leon. The message puzzles him because Chabet and Greenberg have similar ideas, in fact.   Eventually his style turned from German Neo-Expressionism to abstract-figurative “na parang graphics na hindi; parang Keith Haring”. He has modified some of the more radical stances of his college days, though, in terms of the oeuvre of his art. “You cannot disengage the narrative from the formal.” He demonstrates the method of conjuring imagery through the Rorschach effect, for which he is known. “You fold, unfold. If they match, then it’s done.” The Mike Kelley-esque pieces are mostly untitled. As example, he shows his graphic of a tree, shrubbery and a strange flower, which is actually a Disney character he has reversed. “Viewers may see this as a sourcebook of plants, not knowing this bloom is palda ni Cinderella.”","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":150000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":150000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":175200,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":35262,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/48/76/lot/106.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[70000,80000,90000,100000,110000,120000,130000,140000,150000,160000,170000,180000,190000,200000,220000,240000,260000,280000,300000,320000,340000,360000,380000,400000,450000,500000,550000,600000,650000,700000,750000,800000,900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":105,"next":107,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}