Provenance: Artinformal

ABOUT THE WORK

A recipient of many commendations, including the Thirteen Artists Awards of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Zean Cabangis is notable for the technique that has resulted in a body of work that investigates the intricacy of process, the dialectic of abstraction and figuration, and the relevance of the painting medium in the age of photography. In this work, Oftentimes It Won’t Happen, Cabangis explores these issues by foregrounding the preparatory marks of painting — essentially the grid — as an essential part of the subject. The squares may have been the marks left by sheets of emulsion paper with which the background has been transferred onto the canvas. As if to further dispute verisimilitude, the figures are rendered as negative spaces filled out by multi-color abstract bars. The appearance and the juxtaposition of these elements ratchets up the artifice implicit in the art form which, for centuries, has been employed to copy reality. In the works of Cabangis, illusionism is frustrated at every turn, which delivers a conceptual resonance and contributes to the persistent role of painting — this time questioning the nature of reality itself — in this day and age.