{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":14621,"auction_id":14,"set_id":26,"lot_number":"28","artist":"Benedicto Cabrera (b. 1942)","title":"Imaginary Portrait of Sabel III","starting_price":3000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1970 (lower right)","medium":"acrylic on paper","size":"22\" x 22\" (56 cm x 56 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private Collection, Manila","exhibited":null,"literature":"Reyes, Cid and Krip Yuson. BENCAB. Mantes\nPublishing, Inc. Manila. 2002. p. 95.
The Art and Times of the Seventies, by Corazon S. Alvina, Augusto\nMR Gonzalez III, Jaime C. Laya, Lisa Guerrero Nakpil, Marian Pastor\nReyes; Januarius Holdings, Inc. 2020. Page 54 with a Full Color\nIllustration on page 55.","write_up":"S abel’s soul has always been imbued in Benedicto Cabrera’s creative psyche. First introduced in 1966, Bencab's Sabel has gone through several reinterpretations reflecting a specific period and movement in the art world—from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, then Minimalism. It has come to encapsulate BenCab's versatility and artistic metamorphosis. Indeed, BenCab's Sabel is a tour de force, arguably the artist's magnum opus.
Cid Reyes writes in the book BENCAB: \"In the 1970s, with the onslaught of Minimalism, the figure of Sabel resurfaced as a sleek, shape-specific form, recast in space with the fluidity of the human body. BenCab sent the Sabel image on a spin of varying idioms, riveted by turns on a planar/geometric structure and a gestural/painterly surface. It seemed the Sabel image could not be transfixed on a permanent pictorial setting.\"
Reyes further adds: \"His skill was greatly aided by his use of a new painting medium— acrylic… It made an ideal medium for the flooding of a darkly brooding atmosphere. And because the emotionalism of BenCab's early works was keyed to an intense pitch, the chromatism he favored tended towards the moody blacks and the intermediate greys, and the earthy browns and their modulations from siennas to sepias.\"
In this piece, BenCab concocts a unique synthesis. Reyes called this as infusing \"tension into the image by deliberately blurring the line between the figurative and the abstract.\" This piece sees BenCab venture into hard-edge painting. A central geometric portal with sharp contours serves as the focal point. Sabel is nowhere near BenCab's paradigmatic symbol for social and existential distress. Her figure appears as silhouettes seemingly emerging from the portal. The bold, unvarying colors offer a feast of multi-layered, nearly transparent surfaces.
In a 1978 interview with Reyes, BenCab stated: \"In so many of the paintings I did of her, she was merely a \"device,\" as it were, on which I could anchor a composition. I mean, many of those paintings were almost abstract; you could hardly distinguish Sabel anymore. She became just a \"structure\" to base my paintings on.\"
At the time of creating this piece, BenCab had just received the Thirteen Artists Award, becoming one of its first recipients. The CCP awarded it to \"the country's most active, most aggressively ambitious talents… a new generation that promises to dominate Philippine art of the seventies.\" As such, this piece sees BenCab beginning to cement his legacy and assert his virtuosity, culminating in his proclamation as a National Artist in 2006.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"
Benedicto Cabrera (b. 1942) Imaginary Portrait of Sabel III signed and dated 1970 (lower right) acrylic on paper 22\" x 22\" (56 cm x 56 cm)