Pandy Aviado and the artistic road less traveled
June 26, 2006 | 12:00am
For artist Virgillio "Pandy" Aviado, printmaking has become a crusade, a lifelong campaign, or something approaching militancy. Why is Pandy still crazy about printmaking after all these years?
"I wanted to go into the path less ventured into by other artists," he says. "And because I went into the road less frequented by other artists, I believe I have made a difference in Philippine art."
I SHAMBLED AFTER AS I’VE BEEN DOING ALL MY LIFE AFTER PEOPLE WHO INTEREST ME, BECAUSE THE ONLY PEOPLE FOR ME ARE THE MAD ONES, THE ONES WHO ARE MAD TO LIVE, MAD TO TALK, MAD TO BE SAVED, DESIROUS OF EVERYTHING AT THE SAME TIME…
Jack Kerouac wrote that. Hearing Pandy Aviado relate his road travels is like reading about one of the characters Kerouac met on the road: those who "burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." Pandy is a person who never says a commonplace thing. Doesn’t make you yawn.
He recalls his hands getting whipped as a Grade 5 student at the Ateneo for, believe it or not, doodling. "It was a time when corporeal punishment was de rigueur. Doodling even got me into trouble several years later at the CCP. During meetings, the other people would call my attention because they would catch me doodling (laughs)."
But doodling, according to the artist, helps one concentrate, keeps one’s mind focused. (And according to Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes To Congress, "Everybody does silly things to help them think. Some people are ear-pullers, some are nail-biters…" Yes, some are doodlers.)
The road has taken Pandy to Spain, to France, to Amsterdam, to Japan, to Mexico, to Cuba, to the very ends of the earth where his art would take him.
In ’69, he was awarded a fine arts scholarship in Spain under the auspices of Relaciones Culturales de España. He studied at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, obtaining certificates in Pintura Libre (painting) and Grabado (engraving) in 1970. "Studying in Spain for me was like a quantum leap, a paradigm shift," Pandy says. "It was the height of the hippie movement pa at that time."
At a printmaking studio in Spain, he saw artworks of Rembrandt and Goya hanging on the walls. "When I left the Philippines, I thought I already knew everything there was to know about printmaking. But in Spain it was a different scene altogether. I had to relearn everything. And then I went to France, nakita ko iba na naman."
Pandy took up engraving in the Escuela de Artes Applicadas y Oficios under the renowned Sanchez-Toda brothers, and from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He trained with the best print workshops, taking up lithography at Taller Boj with Dimitri Papaguerguio in Madrid and intaglio with the Grupo Quince in Madrid. Pandy also went to the Atelier Gaston Laforcade in Paris.
Concurrent with Pandy’s artistic journeys were his experiential sorties.
When the artist stayed in Cuenca, Spain for a time, he was able to witness a festival where cows were let loose at the plaza, and all the villagers had to do was catch them for their feasts. "My companions and I went to the plaza, and one cow headed straight toward me, hit me, and then I did a somersault. My friends started chanting, ‘Torero! Torero!’ (laughs)." A situation that is right at home in Hemingway’s prose.
Pandy also went to Tangiers, Morocco with a DZRJ DJ nicknamed, believe it or not, "Steel Banana." Tangiers was also visited by literary figures like Cecil Beaton, William Burroughs, Joe Orton, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Brion Gysin, and Kerouac himself. "If you see her say hello, she might be in Tangiers," Bob Dylan sings in a cut from "Blood on the Tracks." By the way, the artist loves the Beats. Dylan also.
The second time Pandy went to Tangiers, he went hitchhiking with an American girl called Elizabeth Snow. He also remembers traveling to Casablanca (the site of the classic Bogart/Bergman flick) and marveling at how beautiful the place was. In another instance, he visited artist Claudio Bravo’s studio in Tangiers.
Pandy also remembers seeing philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the lobby of a Paris hotel. "I cannot forget what Sartre wrote about modern art. The rich people, Sartre wrote, buy these artworks to have something poor people could never have," he laughs.
Back in Manila in ’77, Pandy remembers working with a group of artists commissioned by Malacañang to put artworks by H.R. Ocampo, Arturo Luz, and Cesar Legaspi, among other artists, on the side of buildings. "We had long hair, we rode in a van complete with a wang-wang, we had curfew passes, and it was fun."
Through the years, the artist has worked with the CCP, the PAP, the AAP, the NCCA, most of the acro-nyms associated with art in our country. Now, the artistic road has taken Pandy to the archetypical.
Pandy’s subjects for his 25th one-man show "Archetypal Pinoy" – which opens tomorrow, 6 p.m., at The Crucible Gallery – are Filipino social icons.
"Si Malakas at si Maganda, and the Pintados are icons that (make up) the Filipino identity," the artist says. Pandy’s woodcut panels include "Putok sa Buho," which deals with the first man and woman who sprang from a bamboo column. Other archetypal subjects are "Pinoy Natives," "Ninong at Ninang," "Japayuki and the Musician," as well as "Metro Aide and the Sekyu." Nothing heavily Jungian about Pandy’s bandying of the word "archetype" (or the innate, universal prototypes of ideas). The artist merely picked typical Filipino "characters" – such as the OFW, the street-sweeper, and the jeprox – and put them on an artistic pedestal.
"They are more or less my idea of the archetypal Pinoy, or the Filipino icon as we know it know," he shares.
These large 30x122 woodcut-block artworks are somewhat ambitious for an artist like Pandy Aviado who has, pardon the pun, carved a name in the art scene by working on small things. But as a visual artist – much respected by friends like National Artist Bencab, printmakers like Raul Isidro and Fil dela Cruz, gallery owners like Sari Ortiga of The Crucible, as well as a young generation of artists following the path set by the masters – Pandy is preoccupied with groovy metaphysics, with the molecular, with mathematics, with what Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher presented in his works as multiple perspectives, as different quantum spaces.
"I have another world inside me that defies reality – my dreams, my imagination, which are totally unrealistic. And yet these things co-exist with me, with my realism. That’s how I begin to understand what I am doing," he says.
Pandy deals basically with the macrocosm and the microcosm, "small things being big things, and big things being small things." He concludes, "This ‘Archetypal Pinoy’ series is a microcosm of Philippine society." They are the characters in his latest artistic encounters.
For an exploratory artist like Pandy Aviado, you never know who or what you would meet on the endlessly rolling highway – physical or metaphysical.
BrandSpace Articles
<
>
