Photograph of Roberto Chabet's To Be Continued in the same-titled exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines from 19 January - 31 March 2012.

For over three decades, Chabet taught in the University of the Philippines - College of Fine Arts, where he encouraged his students to question the state of painting. The work, To Be Continued is an assignment to re-interpret the basic palette and foundation of the art form. First made in 2010 with former students Nona Garcia, MM Yu, Louie Cordero, Ringo & Lila Bunoan, Juni Salvador, Mawen Ong, Bernardo Pacquing, Juan Alcazaren, Bembol dela Cruz, Ranelle Dial and Hubert San Juan who submitted the painted panels following instructions to mix their own colors using the three primaries - red, yellow and blue - plus black or white if needed. For the 2012 'To Be Continued' exhibition at CCP, Nilo Ilarde, Felix Bacolor, Maria Taniguchi, and Gerardo Tan created additional panels to further expand the work.

'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; Bakawan (1974), a closed door installation in the CCP Small Gallery; 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.