A familiar seaside scene burned into wood opens the show, but this seemingly congenial image displaying harmony is suddenly interrupted by two pairs of legs fracturing the dominant wave-like wood grain pattern that is the sky. “Here is a freak of nature,” Onia declares in Untitled Feelings, the cautionary prelude to an atelier-like situation in Neatfreak.

Leonardo Onia Jr ’s satirical portrayal of the “neatfreak” is that of someone who is unusually disturbed with things out of their predetermined order, with an obsessive compulsive urge manifesting as a need to keep things clean, taking measures as far as total discarding, but with conflicting feelings of gratitude and attachment enough to try to give things a new brief life before their imminent disposal.  

The apologetic act of giving new life, no matter how brief, to a deemed reject is characteristic of Garbage, an installation of charred and totally burnt pieces of wood piled and overflowing in trash bins, positioned beside a reproduction of the artist’s work space. Against the walls lean framed pyrographs, finished works that one would expect to be treated with more care and attention as what would any neatfreak would. There is an obvious incongruity between the way the finished and the rejected are treated – the rejected are in vessels all lined up, close to where the artist would be. One would also notice the charcoal marks in the walls made from contact with the pile of burnt wood. Is the neatfreak a neatfreak? If he was, is he still is? Was the nature of being a neatfreak the only answer he has found to satisfy his need for order? Is the neatfreak a caricature of himself?

Onia leaves the answers to these questions for his audience to figure out, leaving only visual clues in this exhibition. Neatfreak is Onia’s struggle to categorize, define and understand the perplexities brought by situations where things that used to be somewhere have nowhere to go and feelings that used to be known do not have names.

– Marionne Contreras