{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":21939,"auction_id":23,"set_id":42,"lot_number":"33","artist":"Benedicto Cabrera (b. 1942)","title":"Two Men (Los Escribas)","starting_price":12000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated January 2008 (lower right)","medium":"acrylic on canvas","size":"48\" x 48\" (122 cm x 122 cm)","property":null,"coa":"Accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot","provenance":null,"exhibited":"National Museum of Fine Arts, BenCab: Appropriated Souls: Sabel and Larawan, Manila, March 1 - May 29, 2016","literature":"Flores, Patrick D. BenCab: Filipino Artist (Exhibitions Catalog). BenCab Art Foundation, Inc. Benguet. 2019. p. 83","write_up":"THE ENIGMATIC LARAWAN BENCAB’S CRYPTIC PORTRAITS OF THE FILIPINO AS REBEL by LISA GUERRERO NAKPIL
\nOn the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Larawan, the cryptic Los Escribas (The Scribes) from that enigmatic series casts its intriguing spell.
\nFirst created by BenCab in 1972—less than a month after the declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines— the Larawan series was intended to be a coded commentary of politics in this country. Created from photographs Cabrera unearthed in London antiquarian shops as well as flea markets, he created a dramatis personae of Filipinos, rich and poor, schooled and savage, masters and slaves, the haves and the have-nots. With one feel swoop, he would put across in the strongest pictorial terms, a stern warning and a call for awareness, what today is called “wokeness.”
\nBenCab’s Larawan would thus intertwine the past and the present; and, taking refuge in history, would introduce ironic metaphors on power and society in the many layers of his artworks. In this way did he escape the disapproval of the powers-that-be quite neatly. In 1973, he would even exhibit a series of drawings at the Small Gallery at the Cultural Center of the Philippines which was established by Mrs. Imelda Marcos and had become a bastion of the avant-garde.
\nHe was also one of the first to be recognized by the CCP’s landmark Thirteen Artists Award when it was created in 1970, the brainchild of conceptual artist Roberto Chabet who was also the center’s influential museum director.
\nIn 1974 BenCab would return to England with his family; and in 1978, he would once again return to Manila with Larawan II — The Filipino Abroad at the Luz Gallery. In the intervening years before his return to the Philippines for good in 1986, he would be a sort of international nomad, exhibiting in such places as Bogota, Mallorca, and Glasgow. Baguio would be his home base, where from the BenCab Museum, he would continue to stage important cultural events.
\nThe Larawan, however, would be an enduring leit-motif for BenCab and he would continually add to it with various important accretions.
\nMost recently and to celebrate BenCab’s fifty years of creative output, a series of retrospectives in eight different museums was mounted, beginning in 2015. Two Men was part of those exhibitions, and in particular for Appropriated Souls : Sabel and Larawan; (BenCab at the National Museum of Fine Arts), at its most prestigious location in 2016. It formally acknowledged the significance of both.
\nThe present work at hand indeed captures two young men, leaning on a pile of thick volumes, with expressions that are defiant and almost arrogant, the kind of look one supposedly acquires from a life of reading and study. Are they students, law graduates, or perhaps more tellingly, secretaries or scribes, who were fixtures of business life at the turn of the century. On closer look, one notices that they wear not jackets but are dressed in long-sleeved garments, clues of their youth and junior station in life. They have a serious mien, uncommon for the Filipino at any age, but a by-product of having to pose for the first rudimentary cameras motionless.
\nThe scribe (or el escriba) was essential in moving both the Propaganda Movement forward — and ultimately the Philippine Revolution — by secretly copying and circulating illicit tracts such as Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and the KKK’s Kalayaan. Andres Bonifacio was a scribe himself, attested to by his beautiful, almost poetic, handwriting. Like our modern-day newspapermen and artists (for BenCab was both, illustrating at one time for the Manila press), the scribe played an important part in questioning, if not subverting, the establishment. In selecting this pair of men, who look so identical as to be twins or brothers, BenCab creates an enthralling double message : Could they be his alter-egos, fellow conspirators bearing the same kind of clandestine ideas?\nOnce again, BenCab triumphs in endowing this fragment of Filipino history with both gravitas and an emotive personal dimension.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"
Benedicto Cabrera (b. 1942) Two Men (Los Escribas) signed and dated January 2008 (lower right) acrylic on canvas 48\" x 48\" (122 cm x 122 cm)