Anna de Leon’s inscrutable relationships

“Beyond Comprehension,” the title piece of Anna de Leon’s second solo exhibit, is dramatic in its bareness and simplicity, and at once strange and enigmatic. It is an odd collection of disjunctive objects stark against a concrete wall. On the foreground, strips of white, gauze-like fabric hang from a thin wire. Beside it, on the left is a single blue string hanging loose, its other end lying flat on the floor toward a corner where two quail eggs lie sans a nest.   

There is no movement in the painting, not even a slight breeze on the strips of cloth. It is tense stillness that is almost breathless. Only the thin string, rendered in blue, hints of recent motion. The way it lies slack on the floor suggests that it has recently been severed from something to which it was previously tautly tied. Whatever it was connected to is no longer there, but may have left something of itself in the corner: a pair of tiny speckled eggs. What tries to, but fails, to conceal this disconnection are the strips of cloth, like bandages whose presence suggest a wounding. They call to mind the image of a shroud hanging on the cross, which brings to this piece an element of subdued anguish and grief.   

The rest of the collection — vignettes with blue string, speckled egg, leaf, and strip of wood tied together — seem like exercises in playful juxtapositions and inscrutable relationships. Perhaps in “Beyond Comprehension,” the collection, expresses de Leon’s reaction — a sigh — to the incomprehensibility of life situations, if not of life itself.

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The opening cocktails of Anna de Leon’s “Beyond Comprehension” is today, 6 p.m., at 1/of Gallery, second floor, Serendra, Bonifacio Global City. The show is on view until Dec. 12.