“Nemo me impune lacessit .” (No one insults me with impunity.)

- from The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

“August Deities,” an early work of SANTIAGO BOSE, a highly-regarded modernist among Filipino painters, is on exhibit at the Hiraya Gallery. This rare mixed media work of Bose shows a scene of two nude female bathers among the hill mounds and a shallow blue creek and a nearby fantasy castle. Bose executed his painting on an old low door made of Philippine hardwood ---a hinge into the winding storehouse of frail wander-lust called "Cellars."

Used as anti - to our dominant traditional and quaint norm about sexual attitudes, “cellars” is the part of the Filipino persona where there abounds the acceptance of one's sexual preference, the fuel for creative energies, the stupor of suppressed fantasies, the basketful of banters left dried by social norms, and the fragments of obsessive urges. Briefly, “cellars” are those born still within ourselves.

The heartland of urban centers---business, telecommunications and fun mega structures with its skyward spires---pulses incessantly with the decadent fantasies about sexual deities. The promise of potential partners becomes a pursuit in itself like the view from the front window of the car without the wiper on a sun- or moon-drenched time. The lithographs of Chinese-American artist DULCIE DEE tell about the mental aphrodisiacs of busy bodies.

That urban fantasy-land is an existence and a history by itself according to Jakarta-based Filipino artist FERNANDO MODESTO. Pleasure's excise are strewn stumps in his memory ---begone with details of foliage, ferocious limbs, and girth of timbers. The vista is now an ecological mess still being burrowed by an alien-looking mite.

Italian artist MARGHERITA DEL BALZO draws a different land concession. Her etchings harken back to the mythic cycle of the forest---huge craggy-skinned trunks steeped on two ball roots forever washed by thick water rolls of streams. By the round base of the ancient trees, minotaurs and nymphs pound the mysteries of old witchery.

The rhythmic sounds of the mortar shrink the underground zombies of Filipino artist MARIANO CHING. His rubbercuts state the terrible sense of phallic disability. The disagreeableness of the situation takes manic proportions---a breath clamped underneath a phantom tree.

MAYA MUNOZ hovers on the damp moments of sexual excitement. She articulates the contracting tensions bulging inside the twin bodies: one swollen with desire, the other dreamy with anticipation. On the ruby red canvas, Maya imprints twice all the romance she holds in her spirit. She has recorded the arc from slow throbs and swells rising inside her lover, and has become a testament that Maya is an artist of the sensual soul.

Each sexual act is an entry into a death chamber. Today's most sought Filipino painter of gloom and doom, JOSE LEGASPI, number with forgiving details the liaison in casual sex encounters.

Like a ripple away from his pre-occupation with the plight of sugarland workers, NUNELUCIO ALVARADO brandishes his pen against the pimps and lotharios who bring naïve women from their nocturnal homes and out to the noonday of grief and the shadows of social stigma.