Pretty on the Inside : Felix Bacolor, Mariano Ching, RM De Leon, Trek Valdizno

There is a secret code to things that when left uncovered could lead to mysterious ends. Silence utters an incomprehensible charm on everyday material while obscurity renders an abstraction of beautiful proportions that could make them a work of art. Objects that are readily found may not be as seductively detached, being identifiable, but they too contain an inherent meaning that tantalize with potential discovery. Nothing is immediately given as everything has their story to tell. The artist unlocks all of them to reveal mysterious truths. The artist can be that lone explorer or visionary that sees the life within the silent material.

“Pretty on the Inside” featuring works by Felix Bacolor, Mariano Ching, RM De Leon, and Trek Valdizno at Silverlens is an exhibit that plays with the material components of readymade objects and found signs to translate their immanent potential into new visions of beauty and significance.

The work of RM De Leon has a certain abstract playfulness to them. They are familiar in the sense that they are culled from pop culture, specifically from cartoons, and therefore have a unique entertaining value on them. We laugh at the slapstick comedy, and with such relief, we gain pleasure and meaning from them, regardless of their inanity. In De Leon's work he skewers the ready made pleasure by cutting up the linearity of the narrative, through parts that pop out of nowhere completed by fissures in the visual field that allows the imagination to enter in. De Leon's mastery is allowing the things to mutate into something else without forcing the picture to dictate predictability, and thus produce hybrids that blur fantasy and reality.

Mariano Ching offers his viewers a taste of the grotesque in his work, which is made more peculiar by a deft hand towards impeccable detail, and a storytelling whose quirky imagination allows the viewer the suspension of disbelief as he finds unfathomable discoveries from things normal to the eye. His works begins with the world of the familiar, initially undetectable of future things to come, then subsequently connecting these fibers of worldly minutiae into fantastic images of tomorrow.

Trek Valdizno has a curiosity with materials, which he breaks down into abstract components for his paintings. He uses the material adeptly like familiar language, easy for him to deconstruct and reform into something new. From such process older meanings are rendered null and void, only producing newer symbols to work with following an enigmatic language by design.

Felix Bacolor shares an equal inventiveness with medium details, reshaping them according to the extent of content and pushing the threshold of the story to see what it could form. With his found objects he allows their innate structure and symbolism to free associate towards new beginnings. His joy over the creative process brings out the sculptor in him to put things into imaginative blends and folds, making new hybrids of aesthetic recognition.

RM de Leon, Felix Bacolor, Mariano Ching, & Trek Valdizno’s PRETTY ON THE INSIDE opens on May 24, 2012 simultaneously with Dina Gadia’s PRIMAL SALVO IN VIBRACOLOR and Johann Espiritu’s BUSTED. All shows run until June 23, 2012 at Silverlens at 2/F YMC Bldg., II, 2320 Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati. For inquiries call 816-0044, 0917-5874011 or email manage@silverlensephoto.com

Gallery hours are Monday to Friday from 10am to 7pm and Saturdays from 1 to 6pm.

Words by Arvin Flores; Image: RM de Leon, Untitled (Face Drawing), 2012