Provenance: Private Collection, USA

Exhibited: Mexico, Foreign Friends of Mexico Art Exhibition, Acapulco, 1965

ABOUT THE WORK

Tabuena’s aesthetic is akin to cave paintings. He sums up the idea of “farmer” and “bison” in the most acute and economical way. The painting is strongly atmospheric rather than analytical and has a spirit somewhat akin to cave art, the symmetricality of the sabongero notwithstanding. The technique is very sketchy, the thick strokes aside, and would have been seen as a preliminary study for a painting. The power, the tautness, the delicacy of the various parts of the farmer and the rooster would be analyzed in relation to one another. It is no wonder that cave paintings are invested with so powerful a subjective reality. This emotional reality, sometimes departing far from visual reality, is the preoccupation of the expressionistic artist today. Leonidas V. Benesa wrote in 1975: “Now the same figures and forms grow out of the chromatic matrices of the paint itself, interacting and cohering with one another instead of acting as isolated units. It must be mentioned that for priming he uses four coats of acrylic (three gesso and one titanium white) and that he does a great deal of scumbling and glazing, not to mention sandpapering techniques on the quick drying prima matera, for the sake of certain transparent effects.” “When asked why he has romanticized the carabao into an airy being (and this is equally true of his other recalled Philippine forms), he says “my visual crystallization of remembered forms impels me to paint them in terms of fantasy.”