BenCab: Remember me for being Filipino

Fifty years after his first exhibit, BenCab is holding a retrospective of his works at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila dubbed BenCab: The Filipino Artist.

That is the essence of what he is, what he admires in fellow artists and what he wants to be remembered for: being Filipino.

“I want to be remembered as having touched the Filipino psyche,” he said last Tuesday at a preview of the exhibit, which will open to the public on Oct. 5 and run until Feb. 27 next year. He cites Elmer Borlongan as someone who lives up to the title “Filipino Artist” (and whom he believes should be a National Artist) and the late National Artist Jose Joya, who, even in his abstract works, exudes the certainty that his work “was done by a Filipino.”

His Larawan series, conceived after he discovered a trove of old photos when he was living in London, was authored by nostalgia — his yearning for his native land.

His Sabel series trains the spotlight on the Filipina, with all her complexities. A woman living off the streets who caught his eye but whom he has never met, she is a story unto herself. By immortalizing her on canvas, BenCab has created an unfinished narrative of a woman who could just be any Filipina — a homeless woman, an OFW, a vendor, a dreamer. After all, BenCab likes art to encourage conversations among people.

“Let’s leave her a mystery,” he says.

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Despite his laurels, his fame, and his fortune (Gallery owner Jaime Ponce de Leon once told me that virtually everyone who builds a mansion these days has to have a BenCab in it for it to truly make a statement), BenCab has never abandoned his boyhood curiosity and his desire to experiment.

“As long as you’re living, you should feed that curiosity,” he believes. “You should always have that desire to reinvent yourself.”

BenCab’s artistic talent was apparent at a very young age. He painted on readily available surfaces of pavements and walls, made extra money by doing his classmates’ illustration assignments, and won student art contests. He enrolled at the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts where he also had the opportunity to work with one of his professors, Jose Joya.

According to published sources, growing up in the eclectic hub of Manila in the 1960s, BenCab became exposed to surroundings rife with material and people that influenced his bohemian lifestyle. He left school to work as an illustrator and layout artist for a magazine. Early in his career, he began to develop his technique in form and figuration. His most popular subject, Sabel, emerged from the raw, corporeal depiction of poverty. BenCab’s artistic representation of the bedraggled scavenger wandering the streets of Bambang, Santa Cruz wearing scraps of plastic “stimulated an emotional charge with the viewers and facilitated his trajectory from commercial arts to painting.” In 1965, he participated in his first group show at the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP), marking the start of his career as a professional artist.

Aside from painting on canvas, he has created masterpieces on handmade paper, metal and paper pulp. Of all the steps in creating a masterpiece, he loves drawing best and looks forward to fashioning his next work of art on a Samsung Note 5! He’s had interaction pieces — painting done in consonance with another artist dancing, for one.

“You do what you can,” he tells us. An understatement, if ever there was any. With the number and sheer impact of his works, BenCab has been described by curator Dannie Alvarez as an artist “who never slept in the past 50 years.” A hyperbole, or is it?

A grandfather of two going on three and a collector of berets (“Ever since I started losing my hair,” he jokes), BenCab says he is not in the mold of the “typical” artist. He is not temperamental, for one.

“Am actually boring!” he quips.

Someone asked him his message to himself and without any pretensions — in the midst of a gallery of his best works from his own collection and from the country’s top art collectors — BenCab smiles and says he would tell himself, “Well done.”

“I wanted to leave behind a museum near a forest and I have done that,” reveals BenCab, who has built a museum amid the pine trees in Baguio. “I guess that, too, will be my legacy.”

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According to the Metropolitan Museum of Manila’s Tina Colayco, BenCab: The Filipino Artist presents a rare opportunity to survey the prolific career of the artist through an assemblage of more than a hundred paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture loaned from various institutional and private collections, many of which will be on public view for the first time.

Each of BenCab’s five decades of artistic harvest is amply represented in the exhibition.

It starts from his early works as an art student at the College of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines, to his 1960s paintings when he began exhibiting as a professional artist all the way to his most recent works this year.

The retrospective exhibition at the Met reveals to the public a BenCab “proficient in much broader art forms beyond painting and printmaking.” It also shows how the artist continuously elevates his familiar images such as Sabel and Larawan from mere signature motifs to creative grounds of artistic experimentation and engaging visuals for social critique.

The exhibition presents more than just an expansive view of BenCab’s works. “It is an incisive look into the artist’s life, oeuvre, and journey in becoming one of the Philippines’ most esteemed and iconic artists of the 21st century.”

BenCab: The Filipino Artist retrospective exhibition is curated by Dannie Alvarez. It is a part of a series of exhibitions in eight museums marking the Fifty Creative Years of the national artist. The retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila is co-presented by Del Monte Philippines and Nutri Asia, with the generous support of Smart Infinity, Mercedes-Benz and Pioneer Insurance.

(The Metropolitan Museum of Manila is located at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Complex, Roxas Boulevard, Manila. Museum hours are from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Mondays through Saturdays. For more information, please e-mail [email protected].) (You may e-mail me at [email protected].)