Songs from the painted area
A little bird told me, somewhere along Connecticut Street, a show ongoing and near at Art Informal is Pandy Aviado’s “Living in the Painted Area” (July 12-28), where the printmaker flirts and eventually makes hay with acrylic on canvas, various ones, which as the painter Tence Ruiz puts it, could be akin to a beautiful mistake repeated over and over, until the sun rises and sets and the world is new again.
Galleon of the shattering ear drum, the view underwater and mystic, about to sail across your face of panic. Or, gurgle gurgle, flamenco dancers doing the 1-2-3 hat trick slowly disappearing but not into oblivion. What was her name? I cannot tell you. Surfrider in Boracay, bamboo dragonfly, little lamb fading away. Reminds you of the David Bowie song you’ve never heard, “We’ll meet as strangers,” down Connecticut Street, in July when the monsoon begins and the puddles on the road are screening the last full show, your sadness if we can call it that was like no movie. If I am writing to you from a foreign country, don’t be alarmed, there’s an Aviado painting beside, Ramrod, posture mysteriously like Fray Juan Sanchez Cotan’s, in Tan Lung’s house of ill repute.
The reviews will come in on a Friday for sure, saying that man is repeating a beautiful mistake, over and over, in Leo’s den, in La Mesa dam, again like a ramrod surf, the Parthenogenesis of the red top, thunder and lightning!
Boy A. is saying, isn’t it so much better to see all the rough edges, if a painting is too smooth you can’t trust it.
The paintings, perhaps for the first time in the gallery’s history, climbed all the way to a room on the second floor, short of invading the gallery owner’s privacy, she with a shock of red hair and Marlboro lights, sipping red wine from a long stem glass. In the room the paintings were smaller, more personal, down at the crossroads we fell down on our knees, the locations tucked in places around the world, barely frequented, skirting the psyche, mapping out the psychological redundancies of your absence.
If less is more then Pandy was never it, boy he had us fooled all along, the guy even as a printmaker never was minimalist. Some may volunteer that the central figures on canvas are a silent apostrophe, bearing the secret life of tropes. And the signature a giveaway of a motel chain logo, why he might have been the owner and was now making a clean breast of it, ruminating on your mammary glands.
But these paintings on the second floor, can’t say much about them without fear of invading another’s privacy, the other, like a seatmate in kindergarten who told me it’s bad manners to slurp the soup, or, for that matter, playfully tap the ass of the unwitting lavandera hanging the laundry, a clothesline saga, a little bird told me like lines on the horizon, and Richie Yu and the Heavenly Kwangchow Beef Band singing, “Go away ex gelflend,” and Flash Asoge and Siokoy Ronald applauding because the superior culiculi and the inferior culiculi lived happily ever after.
Well, Pandy could be just one of a mythical five for Philippine painting for the jellyroll pianono month of July, the four others being:
Igan D’ Bayan who opens “Dead Beliefs and Black Vomits” at the SM Megamall Art Center on July 22, Thursday, coming to terms or maybe not coming to terms with a Catholic past amid a rogue gallery of historical villains, as can be gleaned from the initial stills.
Cesare A.X. Syjuco whose “Ancestry of the Stone” launches the artist’s latest literary hybrids on July 24, Saturday, at Galleria Duemila in Pasay, and from all indications the night on Loring Street will be a wild one, wild as the wind and the country’s first family of performance art. As one teaser went, they kiss they tell and they do it very well. Philosopher, stone, or both?
On the same night of Saturday, across town on Katipunan Avenue in the last remaining Mag:net café, Filipino Norwegian wood artist Benjie Lontoc opens his one-man show “Chamber Drawings,” after chamber music, or is it torture chamber. Marilyn Chambers of Beyond the Green Door Fame? Mostly black and white pastel on paper, this a show to watch out for and if you’re lucky, maybe catch Ansyl singing an Alicia Keys song on a good night.
Finally on the month’s last July 31, Saturday, is scheduled the world premier of painter Dante Perez’s first full length feature, The House of Love, running time a little over 60 minutes, the long time production designer and apprentice of the composition master Lav Diaz breaking out into his own in the visual art of film. Screening at the offices of UFO Pictures somewhere near Malugay in Makati, hanapin n’yo na lang, a little bird told me.
