Flux in Seeing by Lisa Ito

Painting has historically served as a means to extend the act of seeing the world. In various ways, it has become a medium to represent reality beyond what is immediately visible on the surface, to draw out a keener sensitivity to our surroundings and the interconnections between them.

For Benjie Cabangis, painting is a form of illusion: a means to channel and change the ebb and flow of reality as we perceive it. In his latest one-man show, Turning the Tide, Cabangis explores the shifting and fluid nature of visual perception and the potential of abstraction as a means for altering and representing reality, changing our impressions and memories of the world as we know it.

Even at first glance, Cabangis' works attest to his detailed study and adept mastery in recreating form and surface. Using various painting techniques and improvisation to build on and obscure the flatness of blank canvases, the artist recreates the seeming infinity of receding space, the push and pull of shade and light.

This technical ease, honed through years of artistic practice, is evident in works such as Ground Below and Ground Zero, which create complex forms and subtle palettes from interplays of geometry and gesture, brushwork and color. The artist also combines square and circular paintings or tondos, triptychs, and horizontal or vertically-oriented canvases as various lenses for viewing reality.  

Surface and Structure

The entire Turning the Tide series progressed from a single work by the artist entitled Flatland, created using  stencils. Repeatedly juxtaposing an originally figurative cutout to create a haze of abstract forms, Cabangis stresses his process of production where images and gestures, one after the other, are captured for posterity on canvas. He also experiments with the actual three-dimensional qualities of paint by intentionally scratching and scribbling on the still wet canvas, creating multiple surfaces through the markings left behind.

Cabangis produces other compositions using photographs of actual structures taken inside his home. This is especially reflected in the geometric forms of his larger paintings, which resemble concrete beams and wide open windows. In some cases, Cabangis depicts outdoor physical structures such as in the work Weep Holes, so named after the circular construction features in dikes and masonry.

The artist's simulation of surface and structure create portals into other worlds, where everything is simultaneously tangible yet unfamiliar. One is transported into uncharted cityscapes or alien interiors, rediscovering the strangeness of familiar forms and loss for words to describe these moments of displacement.

Illusion and Reality

The power of Cabangis' abstraction also lies in their layered references and allusions. This series, for instance, repeatedly relates the literal concept of surface to symbolic surfaces such as geographies, topographies and climates.

These relationships are reflected in works such as Googled Earth I and II, where the reference to this web-based geographic information program is clear in the use of a tondo or round canvas. While the staggering amount of optical and satellite technology to literally map the bowels of the planet are available to those with resources, the work is a reminder of the layered and virtual haze of information that humans have generated over the years, obscuring our original concepts of what our Earth is.  

Another strong feature of Cabangis' works is their exquisite use of layering to create subtle patinas, planes, shafts of light, and shadow,—filling his paintings with a translucency which connotes the weighted presence of mist and rain or the luminosity of sunlight. This is seen in works sourcing titles from atmospheric phenomenon, such as Light Rain, Calma Un Dia (One Calm Day), and Different Climate. This is a reminder that our ways of perceiving structures and surfaces can also be altered by the elemental and the seemingly intangible: light, air, water, fire, and ground.

We are often cautioned to go beyond skin deep in the act of seeing. Similarly, Cabangis' works compel us to reflect on what lies beneath our surface observations of reality.

That the images in this series have originated from stencils and photographs—two simple mediums that have historically reinforced the reproducibility of the visual image—are not really coincidental footnotes but also vital clues as to how Cabangis sums up the process and politics of seeing: as a complex, layered and subjective act.

The process of endlessly building images, of replicating surface after surface are reflections on the role of the visual in today's troubling times and of the implicit subjectivity behind empirical observation. This is demonstrated in Antabay I and II, two different paintings created from a single photo and two facets of a single reality. Finally, Iglap, a horizontal tryptych, precisely captures the extended and uneasy sense of being caught in such a simulacrum: where images can endlessly reproduce, emerge, and disappear in an instant; where reality becomes illusion and the illusory becomes real.

Enriched by these recent forays into representing surfaces and structures, Cabangis' timeless works of abstraction continue to turn our tides of seeing and perceiving.


Benjie Cabangis' Turning the Tide exhibit in the Art Informal runs from August 4 - 21, 2011. Art Informal is located at 277 Connecticut Street, Greenhills East, Mandaluyong City

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