Psychogenic Fugue

 DEATH TO THE MAJOR VIVA MINOR, PATTY EUSTAQUIO

You know when a show is important.  It’s in that tingle down your spine when you walk into a space and everything just grabs you, even as you cringe with unease, or widen your eyes in shock.  It’s in that  jolt to your insides as you eye the workmanship, originality, and attention to detail of the pieces up close.  It’s what you get when you view Patty Eustaquio’s comeback of sorts to the world of visual arts.

Reprise II and Untitled (Paino)

Here, in this debut show of SLab (Silver Lens Lab), Patty pays tribute to the often overlooked arts of crocheting, tooling with leather, sculpting with clay, pitted alongside what we usually regard as the more major discipline of painting.

The piece of the show, in my opinion, has got to be the much-ballyhooed Psychogenic Fugue, aka The Piano. More accurately, an impression of a piano concealed under folds of a meticulously-crocheted coverlet.  Closer inspection confirms that the lace has been stiffened, ossified with epoxy, until it supports itself, nothing else but imagination holding it up from underneath.

In keeping with her sensibilities, even Patty’s paintings sway from the

Reprise I

usual.  Her flower-shaped canvases, so uniquely rendered, soften her gritty images, lending a dainty air to her impressions of slaughter and entrapment.

The show ends on Saturday, November 22.   Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Arteria Axillaris

8 FACES: JECKY ALANO, FERDIE CACNIO, ALLAN COSIO, PHILIP ESCUDERO, MARK ANDY GARCIA, ELVER PANUEL, LYNYRD PARAS, TOM SOLIMAN, JUNJUN STA. ANA

I always go for faces.  Melancholic faces, distorted faces, swollen faces,

By Lynyrd Paras

black faces, so my thing. When I hear that  Avellana Art Gallery mounts a show around faces, I make sure I don’t miss it.

Trust Albert to pull together a show that brims full of varied genres and textures without losing its element of buoyancy and lightheartedness.  Jecky Alano sculpts with his usual terracotta from Bacolod, molding miniature, eyecatching busts.  Allan Cosio does his black on white or white on black portraits, oil on canvas pieces depicted from life.  Lynyrd Paras and Mark Andy Garcia both work with oil on paper.  Junjun Sta. Ana, an artist based in LA, does a series of self portraits on digital prints.  Tom Soliman creates unique collages with pen and ink on old barongs.  Black and White half-portraits peer at us from one wall, all photos by Philip Escudero.  In a surprising volte-face, Ferdinand Cacnio tries his hand at painting.

Up Close: Jecky Alano miniature bust

Jecky Alano

From the moment you step into the main gallery from the porch outside, the art on display compels you to touch, see, walk around, simply imbibe the whole experience.

Leave it to Albert Avellana to sate our senses, make us replete with a show that satisfies.  All done in his own inimitable style.

Lisa Periquet with her Allan Cosio portrait