Photograph of Roberto Chabet's installation Bakawan (Mangrove) at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Small Gallery, as part of Chabet's exhibition 'To Be Continued' at the CCP from 19 January - 31 March 2012.

The work is a reconstruction of an installation first made by Chabet in the same venue in 1974. Bakawan is the name of the local mangrove tree that used to be a common item in Filipino kitchens. The capacity of the wood to retain heat makes it very good for cooking. They used to be sold in large bundles in markets and were used for making charcoal.

For this work, Chabet used forty-nine pieces of raw and unpainted Bakawan and suspended them from the ceiling on a 7 x 7 grid. The glass door was closed so viewers can only see the work from outside the gallery. The brief notes to the original exhibition listed four points about the work not to be missed:

1.     The room was evenly lit not by the room lights but by fluorescent lights hidden from four corners.
2.     The handle of the door was removed to clear the vertical view of any horizontal line.
3.     Walls were painted stark white, even the hooks hanging the Bakawan pieces were painted to give maximum contrast between line and ground.
4.     The pieces are suspended on a grid.

The installation is a staged landscape, which we can only see through a closed glass door. This heightens the viewers’ experience, making us keenly aware about our place in relation to the work. Moreover, by framing and restricting the view of the work, Chabet collapsed dimensions and space into a singular picture plane, creating in the process a ‘no place’, the artist’s sanctuary and protected reserve that seeks equilibrium and continuity amidst the forces that seek to destroy it.

'To Be Continued' is a landmark survey exhibition of Chabet's works, which gathers seminal pieces such as Russian Paintings (1984) and Cargo and Decoy (1989), as well as other works that utilise plywood boards, a material, which has become not only the surface and support of his paintings and installations, but to a large extent their subject matter and content. He first used plywood in his early kinetic sculptures in the 1970s, but it was in the 80s when he adapted the material to painting. Breaking away from the rigid formalism of Modernism, his seemingly ‘purely’ geometric and abstract plywood constructions are often juxtaposed with particular everyday objects that would appear and re-appear in his other installations and become part of his familiar inventory of anxious objects. Highlighting process and the provisional nature of these works, the exhibition illuminates a key aspect of Chabet’s practice, which gives precedence to the fugitive and contingent nature of art.

Also included in the CCP mounting are a selection from Chabet’s China Collages (1980 – 1990), a series of large collages done over a ten-year period;  the Apple Painting Lesson (1983), an early collaborative work with over forty artists; and Day and Night (2011), the artist’s most recent installation. The CCP Little Theater Curtain, which was designed by Chabet, is also highlighted. 

'To Be Continued' was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore - La Salle College of the Arts on January 2011 and Osage Kwun Tong on August 2011. The exhibition returned to Manila as the final installation of 'Roberto Chabet: Fifty Years,' a year-long series of exhibitions organised by King Kong Art Projects Unlimited in various venues in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manila from 2011 - 2012.