Untitled
signed and dated 1965 (lower right)
acrylic on board
5 1/2” x 6” (14 cm x 15 cm)

Provenance:
Private collection, Manila

This early work can be subject to various interpretations as the viewer sees it. One way of seeing the work is a pair of existential shouts, or to be more precise, two heads or two faceless voids making existential shouts.

Gloria G Goloy priescently wrote in 1974:

“They are meant to be recognized as the bereft in us all. They have always been Bencab’s people. In his earlier paintings, they were blurs in acrylic, their features undefined save for their mouth, which seemed always open in a cry of anguish. If today he has given them faces, it is with deliberation. The exploiters, the pretenders, the so called victors are left totally blank, literally faceless voids.”

“An angry young man as he (Bencab) is, and truly, but his protest is markedly non strident because it is markedly directed. The sense of injustice, the pain in him which must be voiced, the reproach. Bencab has taken them and put them on canvas. It is yet another tribute to his elegance that his protest is restrained, but it is no less disturbing commentaries on what is wrong with the world, with Philippine society in particular, that there were and still are these families of servants,” as he calls his people.“