Mariano Ching’s implosion of image collapses into another segment called ‘Flicker and Fade,’ his latest solo exhibition in Mo Space. Here, he leads us once again into his strange inventory of objects and anomalies, moving between the things that could be considered as precious, and towards the hazy distinction of fallen detritus. It is not hard to detect a kind of ‘wasteland’ among his paintings. Eerily contrived and constructed as a hodgepodge of an unusual combination of things—or maybe characters. Or even astoundingly— characters that  have become within themselves as ‘things.’ The world in Mariano Ching’s art terraforms like a corpuscle of oddities, and then towards a living organism.

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These inventories, though appearing chaotic, never cease to present a central character. An elephant’s trunk, a chair, a stool, and a collection of terrariums. They are held against the light like inevitable byproducts of the jumble from which they survived. We can sense the pileup—or a congregation of stuff. Somewhere, a wandering eye, ear, or an appendage, monitor the turnout closely. Elsewhere, there is also something that glows—amidst the accident and the pileup and wreckage. 

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Ching’s figures elude the characteristics of  junk. Although there is that condition, too, that might be warranted because of all the flotsam, but is not entirely accurate. It evades any comparison to pastiche, for they are far from it, from being a blend of many styles. Ching’s world-building runs a tight regimen of avoiding the usual and humdrum themes. In his work, the most common thread seems to be the progression of oddities into something organic, and the juxtaposition of unrelated subjects against future and possible connections. 

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The art of Mariano Ching is a miscellany of things, forming together to create a world that would be  necessary. We are led to view the odd landscapes of what might initially appear as random objects, only coming together to create a remarkable topography of miniature worlds—encased or sometimes sprawling across the strange environment of inanimate platforms. What makes these new constructions doubly interesting are their propensity to defy any set of visual rules. They behave like transformations toward a new species. In a sense, they construct their own new myths, their own genesis and origin stories like the Filipinos’ own proclivity to tell their own ‘alamat’ or legends. Residing between the detritus of miscellany and the persistence of organic, living forms, worlds and characters in Mariano Ching’s art are constructed and combined out of the depths of uncharted imaginations—where his artistic obligation resides in always presenting the unexpected, the new.

/CLJ