Synthetic Species

Christian Tamondong

Opening
August 18, 2021

Art Elaan | Gallery White
2nd Floor, Filipino Village, Ayala Malls Manila Bay, Diosdado Macapagal Blvd, cor Aseana Ave, Parañaque, Philippines

Landline: (02) 7 728-6577
Email: info@artelaan.com / inquiry.artelaan@gmail.com

A distinct hybrid of Pop sensibility courses through the veins of Christian Tamondong, but it’s a Pop expression that has graduated beyond the glamorous celebrity silkscreens of Andy Warhol and the enlarged comic Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein. In his own way, Tamondong has wiped the slate clean by engaging the viewer on another level, engaging him in a complex and incongruous relationship with such past art movements as Dada and Surrealism, transmuted and domesticated through the present-day fascination with Japanese anime crossed with the Pop dimensions of a Jeff Koons fabricated sculpture extolling such universal concerns as Childhood and Innocence, Love and Romance.

In his current show at Art Elaan, Tamondong introduces us to his “Synthetic Species.” A word that is almost synonymous with plastic, anything synthetic is something that has been created by chemical synthesis, and thus, not real or genuine; in a word, artificial. In truth, fake. Tamondong envisions a world that has replaced the human species, entering a phase beyond the robotic and the realm of artificial intelligence. Essentially, the artist has created a human species that accidentally alludes, unwittingly enough, to the great Picasso’s “Synthetic Cubism.”

As compared to the movement’s early phase, Analytic Cubism which broke down an object or a human image into fragmentary images, viewed from a various vantage, Synthetic Cubism used the artificial means of collaged elements to suggest reality. Tamondong’s synthetic human images have been cobbled from a color-infused medley of three-dimensional objects, suggestive of boxes and blocks, cartons and packets, sundry and disparate rectangular containers, highlighted by huge eyeballs popping out of nonexistent skulls.

Aesthetically, they bring to mind the works of the 16 th century Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who was famous for his portrait-heads made entirely of objects, such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books. The Filipino artist Tamondong shares with Arcimboldo a grotesque and imaginative mind that is as surreal and fanciful, with the expected reactions that may range from hideous to freakish, from spooky to downright fugly.

But, to be sure, while Christian Tamondong presents works that delve on the nature of the synthetic, they are real, authentic and original works of creation.