Provenance: León Gallery, The Magnificent September Auction 2016, Makati City, 10 September 2016, Lot 41

Exhibited: Leon Gallery, Two Navels, Makati City, September 16 - 30, 2016

Literature: Villegas, Ramon N. and Lisa Guerrero Nakpil. Two Navels:: Leon Curated Auction. Makati City: Leon Gallery, 2016. Full color spread on pages 92 and 93 and painting description on pages 90 and 91.
Alvina, Corazon S., Tina Arceo-Dumlao, JJ Atencio, Jerome Gomez, Lisa Guerrero Nakpil, and Alya B. Honasan. The Art and Times of the New Millenium (2000 - 2020). Mandaluyong City: Januarius Holdings, Inc., 2020. Full-color photograph on page 39 and painting description and essay on page 38.

ABOUT THE WORK

Buen Calubayan (b. 1980) is a firm believer in the microcosm of one man. Using himself as a cultural detective, traveling inquisitor, and even a Dr. Who– like guru of time, he is determined to ferret out the true nature of the Filipino identity. Drawing from his own family life (as in the Fressie Capulong exhibit, a dissertation on his mother, which took the grand prize at the Ateneo Art Awards 2013), his voracious appetite for all kinds of books (including works by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche), as well as various voyages to untrammeled Filipino vistas, he has managed to create an ambitious multiexhibit series under the general heading of the (Auto)Bio project, “with himself as subject.” Biography was the self-evident title of his first show on that theme in 2013. Two related “installments” both titled Bionote followed. In Calubayan’s deliberately academic language, this referred to “a shorter profile or summary in reference to the longer version of one’s Biography.” In fact, these were his mementoes of “places and times zoomed in from the bigger picture.” In it were featured ethereal landscapes of Bataan seashores and clouds in the sky somewhere between Australia and Malaysia. The series finally culminated in Biowork, his first solo show at the Ateneo Art Gallery in 2015. Calubayan also simultaneously “problematized his work in reference to the larger narratives of aesthetic histories in the Philippines.” In recent years, that has led him to create visual commentaries on canonical Filipino works, as in the Spoliarium and, more recently, the Hidalgo exhibits. Inescapable, however, is Calubayan’s technical virtuosity, placing him among the most dexterous of the recent generation of Filipino contemporary artists—certainly allowing him to be among its mostvisionary. A Series of Incomplete Landscapes is a mind- bending anatomy of time, layered with as many meanings as possible. One of Calubayan’s pet theories, after all, is that one can tamper with the concepts of the past, present, and future and they may be made to intersect and happen all at once. The pink and gold skies of sunrise, the more somber shades of sunset, and the blue skies of a noonday sun create a stream of different emotions in the same landscape. At the same time, Calubayan creates his classic “convergence of the experiencing-self and the remembering-self.” Have we seen these same dawns and twilights ourselves or chosen to remember someone else’s recollections?, he seems to ask. Calubayan’s style has been described in his catalogs as “reminiscent of the works of the English Romantic landscape artist J. M. W. Turner.” It is an obvious mastery that allows him to weave in and out of our collective memories, leading us into his serious process of questioning our histories and liberating us from the predictable. *(From the essay written by Carlomar Daoana)