A Year of Snakes

 

Shedding its skin. Leaving in its place, a place.

The Character has become female, a woman. 

But her molted skin hasn’t come off, she needs to push further to get out completely. 

 

In his 2024 exhibition “Through the Woods, Across the Sea,” Jomari T’Leon fleshed out the journey of a Character — anonymous yet everybody — stuck in a stagnant place, unable to grow. Scattered across the works were sinister motifs, such as skulls, demons, and serpents —- stand-ins for obstacles that held him back. 

 

Taking off from that body of work, he expands his visual explorations by delving deeper into the origins of the Character’s impediment itself: Fear. And with this returns the trope of the serpent, or as appropriate to the year 2025, the snake. 

 

Snakes are feared. Snakes fear. Snakes fear snakes. 

 

Across the canvasses, the Character embodies expressions of resentment, anticipation, concern, bewilderment, and defeat. The snake appears as an omen, whispering, lingering, and prodding her down a path she so desperately wants to escape. Such scribbles crossing her sight, flowing hair, and folds in her clothes recall a writhing. Even the mirror reflecting a mirror, reflected in another mirror evokes a metaphorical Ouroboros. With their forked tongues chanting directly into her ear, she bears a snake-infested temple. 

 

She bears. She carries. She carries fear.

She bears. She endures. She endures fear.

 

In the temple, between one’s eyes and ears, time passes. 

Of the temple is the temporal. Of time is the temporal.

The fear of time is the fear of the temporal. 

 

T’Leon executes these works with the desire to unseal such a primal emotion; the realism in his depictions only secondary to his divided planes and irreverence for foregrounds, midgrounds, and backgrounds. As if disregarding time and space itself, he renders the intangible as figures and layers that are anything but flat.

 

The body is a place, a sacred space. The body is a temple. 

Light a candle to see them writhing in front of you.

Snakes writhe, longing to shed their skin and be reborn.

 

From meticulous decision-making come the titles of the works. In “Chasing your Own Tail I & II,” figures of a snake navigating the canvas lend motion, perhaps futile. Sombre moods permeate “Empty Glass” and “Secret Pact,” where the figure seems to observe or ignore the other. Either frustration or shock are demonstrated by hands partly covering the face in “Here and There I & II.” And lastly, the titular snake appears, head beside temple, silently hissing — a “Trace.”

 

There is a phenomenon known as “dysecdysis,” when a molting snake gets stuck in its old skin, unable to move on and be somewhere else. Molting is meant to be a slow yet defined process. Any external force can cause injury. While the snake manifests as fear, as one looks in the mirror, we might find that we are the snake ourselves. Fear is what we hold on to, what we refuse to shed. 

 

Shedding its skin. Leaving behind fear, leaving a place.

 

– Francisco Jin Sung Lee, Feb 2025

 

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Blurb:

 

Fear is what we hold on to, what we refuse to shed. Taking off from his 2024 exhibition “Through the Woods, Across the Sea,” Jomari T’Leon expands his visual explorations by delving deeper into his self-coined Character by way of the origins of its impediment itself: Fear. And with this returns the trope of the serpent, or as appropriate to the year 2025, the snake. “Snake Infested Temple” opens at Finale Art File on 6 March 2025.