Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

Exhibited: Embassy of the Republic of the Philippines in China, “Three Filipino Artists (along with Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi and Claude Tayag)”, Philippine Embassy Exhibition Hall, 1992

ABOUT THE WORK

As a young man thoroughly exposed to the sad ironies of plebeian life, BenCab was drawn to working class themes at the start of his artistic career. His inaugural show at the Indigo Gallery focused on human degradation and urban misery, reflecting the artist’s own formative experiences in the proletarian districts of Tondo, Bambang and Mayhaligue. The works showed scavengers and squatter scenes, all summing up both the anguish and the defiance of the dispossessed. Such themes continue to preoccupy BenCab in the works that followed, such as paintings he exhibited in his Luz Gallery show in 1968 and the works he sent to the Paris Biennale in 1969, where he represented the Philippines. In these later works however, one detects an increasing interest in formalist concerns and a tendency towards abstraction. Traditionally in the margins, playing a part and concealing sorrow, these figures embody both suffering and compassion. All the family members are sprawled on the floor of the space which they call home. In attempting to transcend the story’s gritty human dimension, BenCab had created a remarkably sympathetic painting. BenCab eschews the brooding heavy-handedness that characterized his early sixties depictions of Bambang. Of all the ordinary people and their occupations, the artist developed a sensitive and precise iconography that marked much of his later work.