Photograph of a detail of Roberto Chabet's installation, Cargo and Decoy, exhibited under the same title at MO_space from 13 March - 18 April 2010.

Excerpt from the exhibition notes written by Ringo Bunoan:

“Cargo and Decoy” by pioneering Filipino conceptual artist Roberto Chabet was first installed over twenty years ago at The Pinaglabanan Galleries. It was the swan song of the fabled gallery in San Juan, owned by artist Agnes Arellano, before closing in 1989. Chabet, who was also the first curator of Pinaglabanan from 1984 – 1985, fittingly ended the tumultuous era with a note on art that cuts through illusion, presenting itself not just as a substitute for reality, but is actually reality itself.

Questioning realism, tradition and modernity, Chabet refers to the South Pacific cargo cults from which the title of the work is derived. It is the last of a trilogy of works, which began with “Russian Paintings” in 1984 and “House Painting” in 1986.  In these works, Chabet utilizes his signature material – store-bought plywood boards. It is a material, which has become not only the surface and support of his paintings, but to a large extent its subject matter and content. In the exhibition at Pinaglabanan, a room – full of plywood boards painted in blue are cut in half and propped in between wooden sawhorses, forming an expanse of blue wave – like V shapes across the floor. One on hand, the work is about the material, its surface, flatness and use of volume and space, and on the other, they are his decoys, leading to the work’s hidden rituals and deeper meaning.

In “Cargo and Decoy”, Chabet points out the problematic representation of art, which is often taken as a decoy for something else, rather than the real, that is being alluded to. He explained “all art-making shares this illusory aspect with the cargo cult. Art is a surrogate – a decoy, a simulation of reality, (and) art as a surrogate is also the reality of art. You just have to accept that art is illusion-making.” He added however “meaning in art tends to shift unpredictably. In the wink of an eye, the real may revert back to being a decoy. Often the art object as decoy, as illusion, seems more interesting”.

Critic Armando Manalo in his review of “Cargo and Decoy” in 1989 wrote, “ There is a sense in which all art is illusion; it seeks merely to approximate reality. But art exists, as it were, in a special niche. In art, the illusion is often also its reality. Mr. Chabet touches on a metaphysical question: the distinction between illusion and reality and where perhaps the distinction itself is an illusion. It is an unresolved question; artists can only propose solutions.”

More than 20 years since its first installation, Chabet’s “Cargo and Decoy” still strikes a chord, revealing a timeless universal aspiration for something good. As much as cargo planes symbolized the South Pacific islanders’ belief in heavenly gifts and celestial interventions, Chabet’s work holds on to the promise of art – an enlightened awareness that transcends time and space, a more expansive and more encompassing consciousness.'