Them

Pablo Constante Zingapan

Inventing Gods and Monsters

At the heels of the spectacular images of deep space beamed to planet Earth by the James Webb Space Telescope, Pablo Constante Zingapan in his latest exhibition posits and lets the viewer consider the existence of life elsewhere—and how that adds to, revises, and ultimately alters man’s view of himself and his place in the universe. “Them,” as the title and the works present, constitutes not merely intelligent life forms but those who, in one way or another, may have crossed paths with early humans, gifting them with the technological know-how in building spectacular structures and spurring the advancement of the species.

This idea has been explored by various thinkers, most notably by Erich von Däniken in his controversial book, Chariots of the Gods? Part of what he purports as evidence for extraterrestrial contact with our ancestors (the so-called “ancient astronaut” hypothesis) is the countless mention of bright, flying vessels in the Bible. Variously referred to as “chariots of fire” and “pillars of light,” these are the counterparts of the modern-day UFO. As early humans didn’t have the language to accurately describe these technologically advanced spacecrafts, they resorted to magical speech.

More than giving a pictorial representation of these superbeings, Zingapan is involved in the long tradition of giving face to the “other” to investigate in what way they are fundamentally similar and different from us. While they have the occasional human features, these entities of light are depicted to transcend mortal bodies, as their emanations leak through the holes of eyes or blast through the delicate shell of the head. In a sense, Zingapan is aligned with the artists who, for one reason or another, distort human form: from Francisco Goya to Francis Bacon to, closer to home, Onib Olmedo.

Even the artist’s process is marked by an improvisatory, intuitive streak. “For this show, I started playing on a series of collages,” Zingapan states. “Most of the time, when I was working on collages, the availability of materials or images drove the outcome of my works. And upon finishing a few of my works, I noticed similarities in them; I could play with the idea of superbeings. I was also inspired by the drawings of my son, Liriko, about monsters and aliens, and used some of his characters for my paintings. As a child, I dreamt of becoming an astronaut and exploring the heavens someday. Now as an artist, I want to paint a picture of how I see and understand them.”

Zingapan’s grasp of the deep cosmos—and who may inhabit its secret corners—ultimately leads back to the centrality of mystery in human life, something that we lose as we focus our attention on the mundanity of the everyday. His works are about the restoration of awe in the ordinary and for the larger universe in which we occupy a mere grain and in which both monstrosity and divinity are two sides of the same coin. Them is ultimately about us: our loneliness as the Earth sails in space and our need to invent gods and monsters in our own image to explain what lies beyond human understanding.

-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana