ABOUT THE WORK

As a young man studying fine arts at the University of the Philippines, BenCab roamed the mean streets of Bambang and Tondo with an artist’s eye and a naive restlessness of spirit. At the time, crowds were gathering on the margins of the city to overrun the streets in protest against chronic poverty and oppression. It was there in the seamy, hardened streets that the young artist sought out his first subjects and pursued them and returned to them through the years. BenCab’s work has consistently been marked by the primary concern for iconicity in the search and delineation of prototypes of Filipinos, combining general racial or ethnic features with highly individualizing traits, the entire allure of the figures at once generic and specific, and always with the clear definition of an iconic image. Faces intrigue him and how the least quality of line and modulation of tone could modify, add to, or subtract from the expression. This fascination with the lineaments of face and figure was matched with his native felicity of line, as he has worked within a wide range of artistic resources. Of ordinary people especially the oppressed, BenCab developed a sensitive and precise iconography that marked much of his work. In one of the prints, while the fieldworkers do backbreaking work, one is confronted with a guessing game about whether the symbolically blindfolded man is a pipe-smoking oppressive hacendero. This work also comes as a representative of the particular stylistic idiom of the artist during this period organizing space into a frame within a frame, as the larger present encloses the past, within a telescoping of time and space. One might say that the Sabel series, which began in 1966 in the ink medium, constitutes the quintessential Cabrera. The figure of Sabel is a contemporary reincarnation in the visual arts of the hapless character of Sisa in Rizals novel, Noli Me Tangere, where she becomes a wandering and witless vagrant after the loss of her sons. To the contemporary viewer, she is also the symbol of the woman, Filipinas, as a victim of exploitation. Poor Sabel was either fleeing in fear or searching for some lost love or possession that she does not even remember. She haunted BenCab’s formative years as often he copied her and took her photograph, a derelict vagrant rummaging among the neighborhood garbage cans and the piles of refuse in the streets, covering her thin, tattered clothing with strips of sheer material. Having entered his anxious dreams, she flitted in and out of his art for years, a fluid presence evading strict definition. Thus she first appears in the 1966 Sabel series as an indistinct figure caught between the light and dark tones of the ink medium. Her hair and a slip of face emerging into the soft dark background, her upper body covered with transparent shards of white contrasting with her grimy skirt, she recedes into the anonymity of the shadows from the white environing space. In 1969, the artist paints her in oil on canvas in the Imaginary Portrait of Sabel. But BenCab continued doing powerful prints depicting the dispossessed and Sabel in the forthcoming decades. Whether he employs drawing, oils or acrylic on canvas, charcoal, or etching or aquatint through which to express his vision, there is always a sense of immediacy.