Provenance: Brix Gallery

ABOUT THE WORK

It can be said that Garibay is an artist who developed from the intense interaction within several organizations of young artists in which he was involved, such as the Artista ng Bayan or ABAY (People ‘s Artists) of which he was the chairman, and Salingpusa (Collective Work), the group of young muralists with which he was associated for a while. Thus, Garibay has come up with an art that fuses high visual impact with intellectual engagement. It fearlessly poses questions, puzzles the viewer, and draws one to explore the complex, ideological terrain of his paintings. Many of Garibay’s paintings focus on everyday people and places, such as this archetypal basketball court scene which can be seen in almost any barangay in the country. He painted ordinary people in an attempt to portray them as a political entity, in this way Garibay’s activism showed through in his work. He truthfully portrayed ordinary people and places, leaving out the glamour that most Filipino artists added to their works. Garibay says that, "it is the richness of the poor that I am drawn to and which I am part of that I want to impart in my art". He bemoans that among the things that are central to him is the knowledge of the self — the individual vis-à-vis the community or a collective self-awareness which he feels is lacking in the consciousness of the Filipinos. For many years, the artist continued to herald the working class in his paintings, but in his later works, he began to gravitate towards new kinds of modern subject matters: musicians, harlequins, mother and child, and the family. "I wait for the right time for me to paint these subjects," he explains. "I don’t stay long in the same style. I work every day, and the truth is, you don’t feel the same way every day. When I paint, it’s all about my ideas so even if I paint some sentimental themes, it has to be according to how I would like it to be..."