Pain comes when you look back and it comes when you look ahead.

Suddenly, here is unlike there, the hours run backward, angels sin, people drown in puddles, and the earth becomes a desolated, unholy flatland.

Suddenly, you breathe through time, yet you mourn for all you could have become and all you know you should be, for what was and what is to come.

Suddenly, pain Pain becomes you.

Traces  of  a  Blurred  Past  is  a  stroll  through  Pablo  Constante  Zingapan’s  latest collage-inspired works in which he highlights recurring visual motifs of thorns and horns against monochromatic landscapes and figures. While Zingapan is renowned for his distinctive gore themes, there’s something bloodier that permeates from the murky hues nestled between the pointed ends of these memories. Reminiscent of photocopies of images from the past, the artist uses watercolor wash as a meditative technique to curate a space that, in many ways, invites us to contemplate agony in isolation — to confront the very testament of our being that bathes us with forgotten remorse.

In this series, the artist employs objects that thrust forward, penetrating the heart and plunging it into shock. Ambiguous, nostalgic figures drift through his works in silent reverie. Yet, the pain from what pierced us, although intentionally blended in hazy tableaux, desperately demands attention. It is the kind of feeling that drags over the skin, scratching cells and pushing harder when ignored. After being stuck in the limbo of time, this feeling would be the only thing we‘re forced to remember whenever the mind becomes quiet and tries to rest.

Whether  it’s  the  thorns  from  roses  left  for  loved  ones  or  horns  from  hunted  elks, Zingapan’s depiction of pain remains the same. It stems from deceit, loss, mortality, a profound disconnection from something cherished, and the shattered dreams of a future laid out with it. It holds us by the hand until it takes over, replaces the blood in our veins, and seeps from the well-hidden holes it creates. It folds in on itself until it becomes the body itself, and as the body tries to move forward, it no longer recognizes its soulless self.

Kristine Zingapan