Auspicious Debut
Auspicious Debut
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, March 21, 1987
AN overwhelmingly sense of historico-cultural rot dominates the first one-man-exhibit by artist Alwin Reamillo at Pinaglabanan Galleries—characterized as it is by his eerie fascination with tropical decay and mass-murder by strangulation. To be sure, it is not a lyrical nostalgia that confronts the viewer in these frightening new works, nor merely a textbook predilection for the jaded history of people, places and events. The necrophiliac in Reamillo, caught in a torrid embrace with the fiercer ghosts of our fabled past, finds its greatest fulfillment in romancing an ancestry stricken with venereal disease. The result is dark, venomous, and strangely mesmerizing.
Make no mistake about it. It would be unwise to snuggle up to the works of Alwin Reamillo, or to bask unarmed and unaware in their somnambulistic half-light. Death by foul play stalks you at every turn, or waits for you in ambush in jars and bottles and from beneath the silken glaze. You must step lightly and keep your wits about you at all times. The angel of the night holds court here, and the pageantry is danced to the sound of gnashing teeth ‘round hollow graves. These pictures are monuments to the great holocaust, apocalyptic signposts drawn in blood, ritual incantations that harmonize with the crackling of fire. They are booby-trapped and deliciously baited, and they come alive with very little prodding.
Young Reamillo arrives at a great deal more than a lush visuality with his skillfull juxtaposition of found and crafted objects, invoking the psychic reserves of such disparate odds and ends as old snapshots, discarded piano parts, two-toned shoes, sprouts and seedlings, bamboo trunks, skulls and assorted bone fragments, knives and nightsticks, religious paraphernalia and transferred renderings from a vintage Sears catalogue. A vile and virulent sorcery, its sum is greater than the total of its individual components, again raising questions about the preternatural eloquence of tandem imagery..
The oppressive heat generated by the collective undertaking seems at once infernal; the sun never shines in this cavernous world of charred remains. And those consumed by fire do death one better. They have no palour. They soar as burned offering soars, singing the praises of the mythical fire-giver, a cotillion of gnarled bones scorched beyond recognition. Similarly, Reamillo’s ghosts have no faces. They change countenance as we change clothes, and our own likenesses are among them. To see your name on a tombstone can be a nerve-wracking experience at best, and the artist’s mirror-imaging shows him to be a young master of quiet terror.
Reamillo may well be the artistic discovery of the year. This exhibition is certainly far more important than all of the trendy paintings that Pinaglabanan seems hell-bent to promote under the banner of the new expressionism. Art everywhere determines its own directions, and not everything that’s young is really new. Coming at the end of a long and venerable line of contemporary artists working to define a more vital and meaningful Pinoy iconography, Alwin Reamillo can look back to nothing less than an auspicious beginning. Heaven helps those who help themselves.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Auspicious Debut” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, March 21, 1987
