Marks Before Disappearance

Anton Mallari, Chelsea Theodossis, and Jay Torres

Time’s Arrow

In this exhibition, Marks Before Disappearance, which gathers together the poetic visions of Anton Mallari, Chelsea Theodossis, and Jay Torres, time is what is captured, compressed, and contemplated, either directly or obliquely, through concrete metaphor or soft focus on the natural world. In the painting tradition, a term for this exists: vanitas, which is representation of mortality, the sweet rot implicit in beauty.

For if there’s something that holds these works together, it is the tacit recognition that nothing lasts, and yet how magisterially the tentative, the perishable, the briefly luminous are pressed upon the canvas through the durable medium of pigment. Here are the works clothed in the imagined flesh by the artists, reminding that all the things that we hold dear—tenderness, the desire for rebirth, even a simple vase of flowers—precariously sit along time’s arrow.

In the works of Mallari, youth—extolled in literature as the antithesis to death—is praised through the nubile bodies of his nude figures as they lie on wrinkled sheets, wrapped in flowers. Flesh and petal coincide, as if to underscore their similar softness as well as their ephemeral nature. These beauties are in a state of languor, absorbed in the heady fragrance of being young, untouched by what will inevitably come.

Theodossis’s works, on the other hand, are valiant in the face of consumption. The artist presents objects that have undergone a transformation: the quick fire having turned some pages of a diary into ash, the slow break down of chalk against a board. Her self-portrait, too, avows some kind of radical change: the smudged pair of eyes that promises a renewed clarity of vision.

The diary, of course, functions as a self-portrait as well. What was once considered as a vehicle of revelation is now repudiated in the hope that a new identity will emerge. Whatever truth it holds is now subjected to the consideration of the present and the future. Remnant words paint the passage: “Heaven is what we imagine happiness is. And hell, the failure of the imagination.” But the past, signified by ash, is commemorated and held in a small box as a vestige of this former life.

For Torres, the genres of still life and landscape provide the enduring translation of life’s impermanence. A vase of flowers, an expanse of verdant field, however, are depicted not as the eye would see them but how the lens of a camera would, with their soft focus, diffused lighting, and vertical band like a glitch in a computer monitor. Nature is processed through technology; by painting its record, perhaps a more sustaining representation may ensue.

Marks Before Disappearance touches upon what has been magnified by the pandemic: our own vulnerability. But it need not be always tied up to the mortal terror of death. In the works of Mallari, Theodossis, and Torres, it may as well suggest a state of grace, a shift to a new life and its attendant freedoms, an opportunity to trace the contours of a world before it vanishes.

-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana