Lost Highway begins with a tracking shot of a road lit by the front lights of a moving car. The painted stripe down the middle moving on and on, as ellipsis in a phrase. And aptly it does as this shot bookends the film, through the surreal paranoiac journey of the guilt-ridden Fred, escaping into pyschogenic fugue, merging inner and outer reality in one long harrowing ride in to the blackest nights of uncertainty.
Most of David Lynch's films present different states of mind as certain realities in their own, which do tend to end as well in a certain fate or destiny for his characters. You just have to choose which version to stake a claim on. And truth is not even the point here but presenting probable scenarios instead.
When art had been freed of its mere mimetic function, memory had been open to recollect from resemblances and interpretations thereof of "reality", and vice versa. This may seem a form of trickery as it's dependent on a bias for certain predilections or obsessions which make up an artist's idiosyncratic world or perspective. Hence, David Lynch's films are a world of its own with its own character archetypes, symbolist settings and inner logic, where time and space flows in a Moebius strip, rather than progressing in a rigidly linear causality.
Mariano Ching make up worlds that reflect back on its cinematic referrent, as though memories are only retrievable if they are mediated or transmitted by mass/media. This is most enunciated in his previous show Lost Days where he has painted time as a crushing boulder on cars passing through unending roads. Highway Revisited continues on from this theme as he seemingly revisits a road trip that forgot how it began or ended, yet marked by totems of that memory's debris - a crashed car, a soiled mattress, turn tables, and gusts of dust - vignetted starkly on white. These totems are piled up high neatly, its layers stratified as the accompanying painted blocks of wood that are sawed to reveal a cross section of earth from where his painted blooms have seemingly grown. However, these layers are made out to look like color blocks of a TV monitor. Memory as lost in transmission. Or burned in through a filter as his method of incising images unto wood by fire or pyrography, fire as an ethereal element stoked against the ephemeral .
Landscape is as much as a construct as much as time is in Mariano's works. It is compressed as much as it is expanded in vanishing horizons, or sliced by layers, or as patinated washes, geologic and filmic at the same time. Nature, time, floats in a stream, in a dream, in a way Mariano remembers them, in how he drives us through this highway.
-Lena Cobangbang
Image: © Mariano Ching, Silverlens
