Provenance: Private Collection

Exhibited: Hongkong Heritage Museum, 18th Asian International Art Exhibition, Hongkong, December 2003 - March 2004

ABOUT THE WORK

With influences from Kathe Kollwitz to Japanese women, BenCab certainly walked the talk when as early as in 1978 Cid Reyes asked him: “What would you say is the Filipino artist’s greatest asset?” BenCab answered: “Again it has to do with this ability to adapt. Whether he uses this ability to a positive end is the artist’s personal own end. The Filipino artist is also concerned with making this process of adaptation suit the local native sensibility; it’s rather like using a foreign idiom as a kind of filter. The final test of course is whether the Filipino artist can create something new out of what he is adapting. Otherwise he merely lives up to that which he has many times been accused of imitation.” All motion and lightness, achieved partly by freely disposed line and partly by the vibrant contrast of dark and light. The details are spare — if any at all, the figures fluidly delineated with a minimal background. His exploration of form found its way out of the late neo realism and high abstraction of the sixties to be able to reconsider the potency of figurative expression in the seventies through the contemporary era. Bencab used both expressive and precise visual languages, which he coalesced through the consistency of his authoritative line. The dresses of the women seem like scurfy cascades. The pressure of the brush accentuates BenCab’s attention to the appropriate density of blacks, the boldness of his brushstrokes, and the occasional use of color to highlight the inherent tensions have an almost magical balance in them within the entire range of his art.