by Emmanuel Torres

Philippine Daily Inquirer . March 16, 1998

Since it opened in 1980, Hiraya Gallery, where the innovative and the controversial have gravitated for years, has consistently been supportive of Francisco Pellicer Viri (b. 1956).

His current solo outing, the eighth in this venue, consists of oils and watercolors. As before, the works can only be described as "literary." Though seemingly innocuous, his pictures often carry a satirical or ironic intent, but never scathing till now.

This time he vents his bile on the Catholic faith he was born into. "The Catholic Problem and Other 'Heresies,' " the title he has given his latest collection, is meant to provoke, but the provocation comes not so much from the pictures as from the anticlerical notes he has written for his exhibition catalog. Some viewers may find it diverting , but the "super-devout" (the artist's word to describe his parents) would be better off by ignoring it.

Those who like their art for the way it brightens a wall will not be disappointed: Viri's is strikingly eye-catching. The draftsmanship is neat to a fault; so is his composition. Colors tend to be sparingly, subtly applied. Anyone who appreciates the abstraction of the human form with such a minimum of means as Viri employs - few strokes, radically simplified shapes, no volume, no shadows, lots of breathing spaces, and as flat as a wafer - should have no problem with it.

To treat the human form this way is to denature it. Whatever moral or social comments it tries to convey necessarily remains evocative rather than explicit.

Spun from One Spool

Highly reductive art in this case often raises the objection that it's all outline and plane geometry. But this cavil is a matter of personal taste, as there are ears that enjoy music played on a one-string instrument.

In fact, his formalist economy induces a state of restfulness on viewers oblivious of any personal, extra-esthetic agenda behind it - even now, despite his contempt against a formidable opponent.

The string-image particularly applies to his work. A straight or wavy line defining the contour of some image travels out of it to become the contour of another. The linear continuity gives off an impression of imagery coming out of the same spool. His art is a playful configuration of squares and loops. The iridescent wash of colors sees to it that the draftsmanship doesn't get foursquare and monotonous.

Popes under Fire

Distinctively drawn with a postmodern cachet to it, his figures fit right in with computer iconography: bottle-shaped torsos without arms, hands and feet, round heads without facial features looking like doorknobs. The sanitized air of science lab envelops and permeates his figures. They smack of modern alienation but with no trace of angst, dehumanized, depersonalized, reified, static, and only remotely related to nature and society.

What his catalog annotations to his paintings amount to is a series of attacks against the Catholic Church based on facts and rumors dug up from past centuries.

To the liberally informed, these criticisms are nothing new; but Viri finds them worth repeating to satisfy a compulsion to let off steam. In the process, he fails to distinguish the Church as an institution from the individuals who at certain historical periods controlled it. It's like saying the whole banking system is rotten because some bank officials misused their depositors' money.

You know that the subjects under attack are ecclesiastical because the doorknob head is outfitted with a bishop's miter and the bottle-shaped figure appears as wearing the vestment of clerical authority, as in "The Lies of the Catholic Church." That there have been sinister, worldly popes is common knowledge, the stuff of sensational fiction. The poet Dante Alighieri had a number of them roasting in hell in his "Divina Comedia."

Viri also trains his sights on the persecution of Galileo, known to every science and humanities student, for which injustice Pope John Paul II formally apologized to the world in 1992, or 350 years after the physicist-astronomer's death.

Not satisfied in exposing the dirty linen of concupiscent medieval and renaissance popes, he also editorializes on such issues as overpopulation and Third World poverty, both of which he blames on the Vatican's birth-control policy and anti-progressive, anti-scientific "heresies" in such sweeping terms that lapses in logic often occur. His catalog text, in fact, provides a slew of fallacies and emotional appeals: hasty generalizations, false causes, name calling, begging the question and the like.

Apropos of the Church's failure to curb the Philippine population explosion, this non sequitur is typical, "It is well known that Catholic priests…. are constant sexual abusers of children. I suppose this is why the Catholic Church is against birth control."

So is this howler: "Perhaps the only real achievement of the Philippines in the past 100 years is the fact that its population went from seven million to 77 million, thanks to Catholic teaching. There has never been a Filipino winning an Olympic gold medal or Nobel Prize in those 100 years."

Blaming the Philippine church ideology for "creating a country where 60 percent of rural children and about 40 percent of urban children are malnourished," he concludes: "That's why the Philippines has never produced a heavyweight boxer."

Ultimately, Viri's assault on the Church is premised on the notion that the Church is an institution incapable of change, that it is made up exclusively of priests, nuns, bishops and the Pope, that the laity as part of its mystical body counts for nothing, and that the Church has no mechanism for self-criticism.

Sin Taxes and Licenses

What appears to be a high point of the show is "The Pope and His Prostitution Tax." This papal tax is new to me, as it must be to many readers. The source Viri cites is obscure, E.J. Burford, whom he quotes as follows: "Pope Sixtus IV (ca. 1471) who allegedly caught syphilis from one of his mistresses became the first pope to issue licenses to prostitutes and to levy a tax on their earnings, augmenting vastly the papal revenues in the process." Viri also cites "sin licenses" that the Church "sold to priests who wanted sexual pleasures."

Interested readers may want to know Sixtus IV is on the Internet. Download a long, sensational 1994 entry at http://wayof life.org/~dcloud/fbns/beast12.htm. Then compare this with another site: http://www.csn/advent/Popes/ppsx04.htm, which presents an entirely different Sixtus IV, much maligned by his enemies for his reformist ideas and whose only sin was not sensuality but nepotism.

What Viri isn't saying is that in spite of the human frailties and follies of ecclesiastics, the Church has survived and that alone, for believers at least, is nothing less than miraculous.

Overall this exhibition falls short of the expectations his text arouses: the pictorial bite is not as strong as the verbal bark. Or rather, Viri's deadpan visual language simply cannot support the weight of his contention. To pull it off would require a greater degree of representationalism - realist, expressionist, surrealist or whatever - than his frugal aesthetic allows.

The need for it surfaces in "The Similarity Between Pagan Gods and Catholic Saints," where the artist has two roughly sketched gray figures on opposite sides, with limbs, hands and feet kneeling before their "gods," just to make sure the idea of worship gets across to the viewer by explicit means - a heavy-handed deviation from his usually breezy art-making.

The usefulness of Viri's catalog notes goes only so far as identifying the characters in his pictures, but that is enough to get on to the appreciation of Viri's artistic qualities. In this regard I would single out "The Persecution of Galileo" as a fully satisfying piece. A telescope pointed to a sky vibrant with pointillist strokes, Galileo's house arrest and his forced bonding to the pope are ingeniously conveyed in Viri-stic visual shorthand.

In the final analysis, Viri's "Catholic problem" communicates better in words than in pictures, which remain for me as light as soufflé and as refreshing as the siesta that follows a hearty meal.