EXTEND YOUR RISKS

September 27 - October 30, 2025

For over four decades, RM de Leon has embraced risk as central to his artistic practice—challenging conventions of taste, form, and meaning. In this new body of work, fragments of mass culture collide with paint, gesture, and accident, resulting in “stained collages” that blur the boundaries between image and abstraction, chaos and order, accident and intention.

R.M. de Leon's work has been steadily influenced by the methodologies of conceptual abstraction and the fundamental principles of drawing. This balance allows for the tension of figuration and abstraction to come into play on his canvasses. By composing images collected from sources such as old books, newspapers, ads, line illustration, and graphic novels, de Leon involves his viewer in the process of his work. Whether drawings, paintings, watercolor, or collage, each work demands close inspection to attend to the clear articulation of process. De Leon does not startle us with artfulness, narration, nor mere impeccable craftsmanship, instead he generously shares his world and his ruminations. We are witness to this construction, or we can be, if we take time and give the space to be present.

The artist's experimentations and playful imaginings across visual idioms has kept the practice of de Leon unmoored with regard to subject matter. When we find ourselves in a period where everyone and everything is fodder of the captured image, where scrolling feeds our visual appetites, de Leon's visual pickings help us focus, reminding us of the still, many possible joys in the experience of art and its making.