
'Sangumay plant.'
It was a warm and wonderful moment for artist Pandy Aviado and his kindred spirits at the launching of his latest one-man show at the Alliance Francaise in Makati in early May. Its title,
Passe Partout, means both “master key" and an artwork’s matting, echoing his years in Paris. A third meaning suggested itself – the artist himself as
passe partout to a ceaseless invention perfectly matched by technique. In 46 prints of painted gravure is a culmination of decades of artmaking in delightful colors, whimsical forms, romance with the plant world, erotic play, humor, social commentary, spiritual quest. Red circles on nearly all the prints proclaimed a soldout show at the first hour of launching. Who could blame the collectors? A prizewinning artist’s exhibit was on sale at remarkably modest prices. A spirit of play shines through this show that began in “fooling around" with outtakes of earlier etchings and aquatint plates. Recognizing them as “works in progress," Pandy printed a selection in black and white, coated them with transparent acrylic, varnish glaze, and
vernis de craqueler for a “crack effect." Brush sharpened to a quivering point, next he painted them with an unerring sense of color -
et voila, old images made new yet hinting at age. This distinctive work would not have been possible without the artist’s command of both the muscular exercise of printmaking and his delicate paintbrush. With an agave bush for a head, wearing a printmaker’s apron and playing the violin, “The Fiddler" was a revealing self-portrait of visual art as silent music. With this magic fiddler were a one-eyed shaman, a primitive idol truncated from its perch by giant scissors, an Escher-like assemblage of wooden blocks and cylinders with cryptic symbols, native spears between two Armalites, a mad Ophelia drowning, a mountain orchid surrounded by flames, tribal and modern Filipinas in seamless swirl, hands outstretched from a flaming red lotus, palm leaves with eyes, and more.

'Shaman's Altar.' Pandy Aviado
Lighthearted surrealism transforming the minutiae of life with its mystery created a record of personal and collective history from a master artist’s eye.
It began in disaster Pandy laughs about it at a youthful 67, but his mastery began in the disaster of successive college mis-enrollment in chemistry (“I was curious about alchemy.") and economics (“It looked like the easiest.") at the Ateneo. Then light broke through his teenage fog in a summer art class with Araceli Dans. At the end of the course with a visit to Ermita’s art galleries, she introduced young Pandy to the father of Philippine printmaking, Manuel Rodriguez, Sr., who would become the seminal influence of his life. Mang Maning’s passion for the graphic arts as a new frontier of art rang in his ears when Pandy shifted to Humanities and joined the Ateneo Arts Club the following school year. There began his guild-like introduction to the Philippine art- art movies, new music, lectures and workshops by senior artists, trooping to the U.S. Embassy for a film on printmaking, revelling in the Ateneo Art Gallery’s growing collection of classic prints by Rembrandt, Goya, Dali, Picasso, Durer et al.

'Reaching out.' Pandy Aviado
An eager aspirant wasted no time signing up for once-a-week lessons at Rodriguez’s new Contemporary Graphic Arts Workshop across the San Andres fruit market. There Pandy progressed from woodcuts to “etching in stone," printing his work on the country’s first lithographic press imported in 1887, since donated to the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP). A second summer of art brought a leap of faith – he would shift to the UST College of Fine Arts because Mang Maning was teaching there. He passed a talent test from no less than Victorio Edades, the Father of Filipino Modern Art. But alas, he did not last a semester. “His Majesty, the Rector" discovered his failing grades in non-art subjects at the Ateneo and refused to let him stay. But Mang Maning was also teaching at the PWU College of Music and Fine Arts, and so Pandy wound up as one of its only two male students. There began his lifelong romance with the etching, engraving and mezzotint of intaglio. Fine lines engraved in metal and imbedded with ink are forever linked in his mind with the first two art prizes he won in a Shell student art competition in the mid ‘60s. A first art sale and enthusiastic reviews for his first one-man print show were followed by an endorsement for a Spanish government study grant from the art patron Fernando Zobel. That began began six-year soujourn in Europe at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 1969. Hands-on work as a printer in a publishing house printing the etchings of modern Spanish artists brought Aviado a signal compliment - the master Spanish printmaker Don Antonio Lorenzo’s invitation to become his personal printer. But there was more to learn. In a year, a maturing artist moved on to “the Mecca of Printmaking," Paris, to learn some more at the Ecole Beaux Arts and work as an arthouse printer.

'Paris Walks.' Pandy Aviado
Home in 1976 with a wealth of experience brought a now long-haired artist (an earring on his left lobe) to one new thing after another - instigating the giant wall paintings of
Kulay Anyo ng Lahi with his buddy Boy Rodriguez, teaming up with Nonoy Marcelo in the animated film Tadhana, organizing a printmaking workshop in Baguio, experimenting with handmade paper as a new art surface. With a new wife and child, he was back at the PWU College of Fine Arts, teaching. "Carl Jung says that ‘vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape,’" he said, shuttling between solitary artmaking and spreading the gospel of printmaking. He had risen to college director when another signal honor ended his PWU stint in 1989 – an invitation from the Asian Arts Museum in Fukuoka, Japan to do an edition of his etchings for its prestigious collection. Seeing an expansive new landscape for gifted Filipinos in Asia’s thriving printmaking scene now fired him to find a home for an orphaned Printmakers Association of the Philippines (PAP) created by Mang Maning in the ‘60s. Turning on a fellow-Atenean and visual artist, Joly Benitez, Pandy found a home for both the PAP and AAP at the Mariposa Gallery and Workshop. By life’s own ceaseless invention, the end of the Marcos regime next saw Pandy’s unplanned rise to national leadership. With his successive election as AAP president and appointment as director of the CCP’s Visual Arts Coordinating Center, the PAP finally found a permanent home at the Folk Arts Theater. The Marcos government’s broken commitment to give printmaking a permanent place in the CCP had driven Pandy’s spiritual father Manuel Rodriguez, Sr. to disenchanted migration. But when Pandy next assumed a position at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the PAP won a coveted Alab sa Sining Award and printmaking became the workshop most requested by schools and art groups outside Metro Manila – a
passe partout to art for all, just as Mang Maning once said.
– GMA News