Aviado at the CCP: Return of The Pixie Hitman
Aviado at the CCP:
Return of The Pixie Hitman
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, November 21, 1987
IF looks could kill, Pandy Aviado's malevolent imagery would be genuine cause for alarm. And if thoughts could kill, Pandy himself would be Public Enemy Number One.
As it is, he virtually escapes detection — a vagabond pixie hitman with Charlie Chan eyes and a plasticene smile, this self-styled St. Pandy of the Presses, Joma's look-alike and he of the vile, caustic snicker — one venomous honcho back-slapping his way to your blind side to plant his stiletto in your spine.
The late Leo Benesa tells us that randy Pandy was probably the most significant printmaker to emerge here from out of the mid-60's, the one true heir-apparent to the foolscap crown shared with some unease by both Rodriguez and Paras-Perez. Wunderkind Pandy of the psychedelic etchings. Poison-pen troubadour of the pop psyche. Inveterate wanderer in the vast Euro-Asian wasteland.
Not having been around in the 60s, ourselves, we know only what we see. Going one-on-one with Pandu's prints — much like going one-on-one with Pandy himself — is a drive down a steep embankment peppered with hair-trigger land mines. Gravity seals your doom. Guns wave in the wind like gay fiesta buntings at a Soapbox Derby finals. Seeing-eye hands with trick-fingers wave you off at the starting line, only to grab you from behind. You’ve never live to see Akron, Ohio. The checked flags have teeth, and both muse and floral bouquet blow up in your face in murderous slapstick fashion. All the world's a false bottom in some crafty magician's valise; and you, Virginia, dear child of the 80's, are the chimp of honor.
So what have we here? Aviado, now purporting to be PWU's Dean of Fine Arts, has unveiled a new suite of drypoints and etchings at the CCP Small Gallery no less. The bizarreness of it all is impossible to resist. And Pandy Aviado, having a row of sixes burned into his scalp, knows well the art of bait and tackle. Then, too, Pandy's latest produce should raise its share of eyebrows, obscured to a murky mouse-grey like a row of cheerless cadavers, strewn with subliminal images that dance in and out of view like Rorshachs on a crumbling coat of paint. Did you ever, as a child, lie half-awake in bed to watch the cracks in the ceiling change into a face, an ear, an elephant or a cat, a shoe, a swastika, or Roy Rogers' pet horse?
Like the young fools we are, what Pandy has shed in terms of clean-cut imagery is precisely what we miss here, Mea maxima culpa! Have we not heard that murky is beautiful and that a master's prerogative is sacred? Who are we, mere hatchlings, to expect more from this apocalyptic feast than a persistent ringing in the ears?
Take note, I have this recurring dream in which Pandy sticks wavy needles into my most secret places, probing for sandcrabs or whatever, urging me to sign away my citizenship and my children's inheritance to boot. On his brow a death's-head is emblazoned, and dangling from his neck is an arabesque locket, rather in poor taste, that bears the autographed likeness of Robert Jaworski on a basketball. Upon waking, I have the guy all figured out. I think that deep down inside, like some kind of Jungian death-wish, Pandy Aviado would have loved more than anything else to have been athletic, towering and beautiful.
This latest outing at the CCP is proof that, having thus been denied by fate, Pandy has signed himself over to the dark side. But then again, we already knew as much.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Aviado at the CCP: Return of The Pixie Hitman” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, November 21, 1987
