Provenance: Finale Art File

Literature: "Art Fair Philippines 2015", The Link, Makati, February 5-8, 2015

ABOUT THE WORK

Annie Cabigting has emerged as one of the most talented Filipino artists of the 21st century, notable for a continuing series of works in which viewers, usually seen as passive recipients of art, become the subject matter. In Black (After Ad Reinhardt the Moma), two people talk about the work of the Ad Reinhardt who claimed that the one object of abstract art “is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive — non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-Expressionist, non-subjective". The black canvas appears as a negative space in the well-lit interior of the museum as the women, both wearing black, visually merged with the painting that they are vigorously discussing. Part of the special exhibition of Cabigting for Art Fair Philippines in 2015, this work gained a conceptual layer as the audience got to see the work while seated on the Mies van der Rohe bench, the same one depicted in the painting. In a way, the painting doubled the real, as other fair-goers presumably saw those who were looking at Cabigting’s painting of two women looking at Reinhardt’s painting. “Working in a Photorealist manner,” Ringo Bonuan writes in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, [Cabigting] uses painting as a means to question memory, simulacra, and expression and to examine and subvert the cycles of visual consumption. Blown-up and duplicated following a grid-by-grid process, the images in her paintings are not direct representations of the artworks themselves, but systematic reconstructions of their photographic histories, constantly recalled and repeated". The painting Black is an epitome of such reconstructions.