Gajah Gallery October 22, 2026
Gajah Gallery October 22, 2026
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
October 23, 2026
Exhibition wall text: A curatorial statement
BenCab in Honor of Form
Curated by Danne Alvarez
17 Oct – 29 Nov 2026
An exhibit of select sculptural pieces reflecting memorable subjects by the artist.
Exploring depth of meaning or intent has been the underlay in the appreciation of BenCab’s many works. His intention to create large two-dimensional pieces resonates vividly, allowing the viewer to imagine that there is something beyond the flat surface of the canvas. He leads the viewer to imagine that there is more beyond and behind—as the sinuous wraps and strokes embrace the imagination.
This discovery comes in stages in BenCab’s works. A singular piece morphs into a diptych, then into a triptych at some point. Then the painting becomes a print, a collage, and then a sculptural piece.
Through the years, he has consistently explored the limits of his large canvas. Simultaneously, he returned to explore the medium of clay, inspired by Anastacio Caedo, his University of the Philippines professor in Sculpture. What follows are his intimate and private explorations of other materials, which served as a preview to his intention to create works in different media with massive proportions.
From painting, to print, to multi-media, to sculpture, BenCab continues to explore.
In his new sculptural works, BenCab consistently shows the minute linear strokes that were evident in his paintings. The flowing drapes, the movement of human forms proportionate in scale, with a minimal degree of foreshortening—his sculptures are a clear echo of his consistent expressions evident in all forms of his works.
Artist quotation on wall
“Because of my background as an illustrator, I can create a story from suggestion. My early drawings had a Käthe Kollwitz influence. I liked the monumentality of what she does.”
“I have been fascinated with movement and drapery. To use drapery is one way of making movement. I like using drapery to create a freer form.”
Catalogue: Foreword (page 5)
Benedicto “BenCab” Cabrera has long occupied a settled position in the canon of Southeast Asian art. A Philippine National Artist with a practice spanning more than six decades, he belongs in the same company as figures like Latiff Mohidin, part of the small group of artists whose work effectively defines what postwar Southeast Asian modernism looks like, in the region and beyond it. That standing has never been in question, and this exhibition does not set out to argue for it again. What it sets out to show is a dimension of BenCab’s practice that even his most attentive followers may not know well.
That dimension came into view for us during a visit to the BenCab Museum in Baguio. There, alongside the paintings and prints that anchor his reputation, we encountered a small group of early bronze sculptures. They were private, largely unseen works BenCab had made decades earlier, inspired in part by his sculpture professor at the University of the Philippines, Anastacio Caedo. It became clear that sculpture was not a late addition to his practice, but a current that had been running underneath it for years, waiting for the occasion and the resources to be brought fully to the surface.
That occasion arrived in 2024, when BenCab, working with Yogya Art Lab, completed Sabel, the first sculpture in what has become a sustained and still-expanding body of bronze work. *Sabel* is inseparable from BenCab’s own history, her figure inspired by a woman he once observed scavenging near his window in 1964, who has since carried the emotional weight of his practice across six decades of drawing, painting, and printmaking. BenCab
Fig. 1. Detail of A Walk by the Sea, 2025.
Catalogue page on Mother’s Love and Three Muses (page 23)
Mother’s Love translates the painting Madonna V (2014), in which a mother lifts her son onto her shoulders, both of them smiling. The image belongs to a long sequence of Madonnas that began with Madonna in a Jeep (1988) and reached a high point in the 2015 exhibition Madonna at the BenCab Museum. That sequence is part of a modernist tradition, going back at least to Galo B. Ocampo’s Brown Madonna (1938), to bring the colonial icon of the Madonna and Child into a recognizably Filipino setting.
BenCab’s bronze goes further in rendering the icon more specific. Here, mother and child are barefoot, and the artist depicts her wearing a plain shirt while the child wears a shirt and shorts. Nothing marks them as sacred beyond the gesture they share, likewise implicitly elevating the everyday in turn.
Developed from digital model to clay and then to resin before casting, this sculpture was one of the first pieces to receive the two-tone patina that separates skin from cloth, which here reads with particular warmth. Hung nearby, Nanny and Ward (2017), lent by the artist, carries the theme of care and the family, toward the wider work of childcare.
Three Muses, the fifth sculpture made with YAL, takes up the oldest subject in the exhibition. The Three Graces, carried from antiquity through Botticelli and Canova to Picasso’s The Three Dancer (1925). BenCab has visited this subject multiple times, from Three Graces (1995) to Three Muses (2017). Swathed in full, bright fabric, the kind “one might happen upon the street,” the artist brings these goddesses to the everyday.
The bronze transforms these three muses into one solid figure. Bound into one rotating mass by a current of drapery whose deep grooves catch the light and lead the eye around them, grace appears “not as an ideal to be upheld but as a condition in flux,” in the foundry’s phrase. Compact enough to be held whole in a single glance at 70 cm, it is the exhibition’s clearest demonstration of what a sculpture in the round can do that a painting cannot. It has no single principal view, and the viewer has to circle it to complete it.
Wall label for Three Muses
BENCAB
(B. 1942, MANILA, PHILIPPINES)
THREE MUSES
2024
BRONZE
70 × 60 × 45 CM
EDITION 2 OF 6 AND 1 ARTIST PROOF
THREE MUSES
2017
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
121 × 175.5 CM | FRAMED: 139 × 193.5 × 8 CM
BENCAB MUSEUM COLLECTION
In Three Muses, BenCab infuses a humanistic quality to a divine archetype. Revisiting his 1995 painting with the same moniker, BenCab recasts the iconic Greek triumvirate as contemporary figures that belong to the everyday instead of the ethereal. In his 1995 work, the Three Graces are featured as a group of women swathed in vibrant voluminous fabrics, barefoot with hands intertwined as they circle each other on the street. Lifting them from canvas to bronze, they take on a vibrancy and rhythm shaped by the artist’s enduring affinity for sweeping gestural lines. In the work, BenCab veers away from the canonical focus on the nude form as the sculpture gathers these three female figures together in a current of drapery; their shroud-like shapes echoing that of *Sabel*’s as it seamlessly binds them in a lyrical dance.
The soft slope of the women’s bare shoulders, the gentle sway of their hair, and their serene expressions offer a reprieve from the action of their diaphanous dresses, highlighting the subject’s poise and tranquility. With its circular composition, the bronze allows admiration from every angle and draws one towards the Muses’ orbit—the robe’s deep undulations capturing the light, and leading the eye with the flow of fabric, ultimately arresting the viewer in their dance.
Rather than a direct citation of the classical trope, BenCab articulates a contemporary image of the feminine that resists. Through sensuous lines, voluminous forms, and a persistent sense of motion, grace emerges not as an ideal to be upheld but as a condition in flux, shaped by energy, tension, and becoming.
Installation views and related works
The exhibition presents bronze sculptures of varying scales (including multi-figure groups, single figures in motion, and intimate studies), large wall-mounted drawings of female nudes in varied poses, video documentation of the artist working in clay and bronze at Yogya Art Lab, and paintings/photographs that establish continuity with earlier two-dimensional work. Key motifs include drapery in active motion, maternal/care relationships, the recurring figure of Sabel, and the translation of planar gesture into volumetric form.
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Collation and relational synthesis
The materials establish a coherent premise: BenCab’s late-career turn to bronze sculpture is not an abrupt departure but the surface manifestation of a long-submerged current within a six-decade practice. The exhibition “BenCab in Honor of Form” (17 October–29 November 2026, curated by Danne Alvarez) stages this emergence through a carefully orchestrated dialogue between new bronzes produced in collaboration with Yogya Art Lab (YAL), earlier paintings and drawings, documentary video of process, and wall texts that explicitly frame sculpture as the culmination of a progressive material and formal investigation—painting → print → collage → multi-media → sculpture.
Central relational threads:
- Continuity of line and gesture. The “minute linear strokes” of the paintings reappear as the sharp, light-catching grooves of drapery in bronze. What was once a graphic or painterly mark becomes a sculptural contour that organizes volume and directs the viewer’s circumambulation.
- Drapery as ontological operator. Repeatedly cited by the artist and catalogue writers, drapery functions as the primary agent of movement, of “freer form,” and of the translation of the everyday into the monumental. In Three Muses the fabric binds three figures into a single rotating mass; in Sabel and related works it becomes both shroud and dynamic force.
- Humanization of archetype. Classical (Three Graces) and Christian (Madonna and Child) icons are relocated into the Filipino everyday—barefoot, plainly clothed, street-level—while retaining a residual sacral charge through gesture and monumentality. This continues a longer Philippine modernist project inaugurated by Galo B. Ocampo’s Brown Madonna (1938).
- Institutional and technical mediation. The partnership with YAL (founded 2012 by Jasdeep Sandhu and Yunizar) supplies the industrial and artisanal infrastructure that allows private, earlier experiments in clay and bronze to scale into editioned public works. Digital modeling → clay → resin → bronze with selective two-tone patina marks a hybrid contemporary process that preserves the artist’s hand while enabling editioning and large-scale realization.
- Temporal layering. Early private bronzes (inspired by Anastacio Caedo), mid-career paintings of Sabel and Madonnas, 2017 Three Muses painting, 2024–2025 bronzes, and 2025 catalogue texts form a stratified archive in which each medium retrospectively illuminates the others.
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A conclusion
The premise of “BenCab in Honor of Form” may be stated with precision: the late bronzes constitute the dialectical sublation of BenCab’s lifelong formal inquiry, in which the planar and the volumetric, the graphic and the plastic, the archival and the contemporaneous are held in productive tension rather than sequential supersession. What appears as a “turn” to sculpture is more accurately the moment when a long-running undercurrent—detectable in the early Caedo-inspired bronzes, in the insistent monumentality of the Sabel figure, and in the artist’s own statements about drapery and suggestion—achieves technical and institutional conditions of full legibility.
At the level of formal ontology, the works enact a phenomenology of the fold. Drawing on (while never citing) the Deleuzian and Merleau-Pontian lineages of the fold as both material and metaphysical operator, BenCab’s drapery does not merely decorate the body; it produces the body as an event of continuous becoming. In *Three Muses* the three figures do not stand in additive relation; they are precipitated by a single continuous surface whose deep grooves both absorb and reflect light, compelling the spectator into orbital movement. The sculpture has no privileged frontal view precisely because the fold abolishes the hierarchy of front and back that painting, even in its most ambitious multi-panel formats, still retains. The catalogue’s insistence that “grace appears not as an ideal to be upheld but as a condition in flux” is therefore not rhetorical ornament but a precise phenomenological claim: the bronze makes visible the temporal and kinetic dimension that painting can only imply through successive states or through the viewer’s imaginative completion.
This formal operation is inseparable from a politics of the everyday sacred. By relocating the Madonna and the Graces into the register of bare feet, plain cloth, and street-level encounter, BenCab continues the postcolonial modernist project of vernacularizing the Western iconographic inheritance while simultaneously resisting the sacralization of poverty that sometimes accompanies such gestures. The two-tone patina that separates skin from cloth is decisive here: it preserves the distinction between flesh and fabric without allowing either to harden into fixed essence. Skin remains warm, cloth remains active; neither is pure nature nor pure culture. In this sense the sculptures perform a subtle critique of both classical idealism and certain strains of social-realist pathos.
Esoterically, one may read the entire body of work as a late-style meditation on the artist’s own medium-historical position. Having defined, with a small cohort of peers, the visual language of postwar Southeast Asian modernism, BenCab now stages the return of the repressed third dimension that modernism’s optical and planar bias had partially suspended. The collaboration with YAL is not merely logistical; it is the contemporary equivalent of the Renaissance workshop or the Rodin atelier, in which the master’s conception is realized through a distributed technical intelligence. The digital-to-clay-to-bronze pipeline introduces a further fold: the virtual model becomes the matrix of the material, yet the final surface still carries the indexical traces of the artist’s hand and the foundry’s labor. The work thus occupies a liminal zone between the auratic and the editioned, the singular and the multiple—precisely the zone in which late modernism and contemporary art most productively intersect.
The exhibition’s rigorous staging—juxtaposing finished bronzes with process video, wall drawings of nudes, and earlier paintings—forces the viewer to experience this sublation as a lived temporal sequence rather than a curatorial assertion. One moves from the two-dimensional suggestion of movement to its three-dimensional actualization, from the private early experiment to the public late realization, from the solitary studio to the collaborative foundry. In doing so, “BenCab in Honor of Form” does not merely display sculptures; it constructs an argument about the persistence of form across media and across decades. Form, in this argument, is neither static morphology nor pure optical effect; it is the continuous, drapery-mediated negotiation between memory, gesture, material resistance, and the viewer’s own circling body. The premise, fully expounded, is therefore this: that BenCab’s bronzes complete a lifelong inquiry by making visible the very process of formal becoming that his earlier work had always already implied.
BenCab in Honor of Form (17 Oct–29 Nov 2026, curated by Danne Alvarez) presents the artist’s late bronze sculptures as the culmination of a six-decade practice. Developed with Yogya Art Lab, works such as Three Muses and Mother’s Love translate earlier paintings into volumetric form, using active drapery to generate movement and bind figures into continuous masses. Classical and Christian archetypes are relocated into the Filipino everyday. The exhibition stages a formal ontology of the fold: grace appears not as ideal but as flux, compelling the viewer to circle the work. Sculpture thus sublates BenCab’s lifelong inquiry into line, gesture, and becoming.
The exhibition succeeds in making visible a previously under-emphasized dimension of BenCab’s practice, yet it remains constrained by a largely affirmative, linear narrative of formal continuity.
The staging is intelligent: process videos, wall drawings, and earlier paintings create a productive triangulation that allows the bronzes to be read as both culmination and translation. The focus on drapery as an active formal agent is precise and theoretically generative. Works such as Three Muses demonstrate genuine sculptural intelligence—compact, multi-axial, and resistant to a single privileged viewpoint—while the selective two-tone patina effectively preserves the distinction between skin and cloth without sentimentalising either. The body of works set precedence, affirmation and a culmination.
The curatorial and catalogue framing is overly teleological. Sculpture is presented as the natural, almost inevitable endpoint of a progressive sequence (painting → print → collage → sculpture). This smooths over the uneven, intermittent, and sometimes private nature of BenCab’s earlier sculptural experiments and risks reducing the complexity of medium-specificity to a developmental story. The repeated humanisation of archetypes (Madonna, Three Graces) is treated as self-evidently progressive; little critical pressure is applied to the politics of elevating the “everyday” or to the residual sacralisation of the female body that persists even in street-level dress.Institutionally, the heavy reliance on Yogya Art Lab is acknowledged but not interrogated. Questions of authorship, technical mediation, and the economics of editioned bronze production remain largely unexamined. The result is a polished, coherent presentation that affirms rather than complicates BenCab’s late style.
About Yogya Art Lab
Founded in 2012 by Gajah Gallery’s director Jasdeep Sandhu and Yogyakarta-based artist Yunizar, Yogya Art Lab (YAL) has become a vibrant hub that thrives on experimentation and collaboration, pairing esteemed artists from across Southeast Asia with expert craftsmen to produce sculptures, installation and other art pieces in a variety of mediums.
Over the years, YAL has constantly evolved based on the needs of the artists and their unique sensibilities: while specialising in bronze, the team at YAL has worked with materials ranging from aluminium and ceramics, to paper and Fresnel lenses. At YAL, the fusion of artistic vision and technical mastery continually seeks to challenge the limits of creative possibility, forging the path ahead to explore and inspire new frontiers of artistic expression and imagination.
Owner: Jasdeep Sandhu – info@yogyaartlab.com
Director: James Page – jjpage@gmail.com
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™' s connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) serves as a defining pillar of his professional journey, most recently celebrated through the launch of the ACC Global Alumni Network.As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan's art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
He is a Filipino multidisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, painter, independent curator, researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose practice spans contemporary art, curatorial work, and cultural advocacy. He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.His practice appears to represent several interconnected concerns:
Cultural work as artistic practice. Roldan has argued that the labor of curating, organizing exhibitions, teaching, documentation, and cultural administration should be understood as creative work rather than merely support work. This perspective has been reflected in his writings and exhibitions.
Social and political engagement. His artworks frequently address politics, religion, faith, denial, courage, social inequality, and the everyday experiences of Filipinos. He has stated that he draws inspiration from Filipino cultural practices while approaching painting, printmaking, and installation from a conceptual perspective.Printmaking and conceptual art. Roldan is particularly recognized for his printmaking, with works shown internationally, including exhibitions in Japan and France. His practice also encompasses painting, photography, installation, and curatorial research.International cultural exchange. A significant milestone in his career was receiving an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2003, which enabled him to undertake research and create work in the United States while engaging with artists and curators internationally.
More broadly, Roldan's work represents an attempt to bridge artistic production, curatorial practice, scholarship, and cultural activism . His writings often emphasize postcolonial discourse, cultural memory, and the ethics of artistic collaboration, positioning the artist not only as a maker of objects but also as a builder of cultural infrastructure.
In the Philippine contemporary art context, he can be understood as representing the figure of the artist-curator-cultural worker —someone who contributes both through making artworks and through developing exhibitions, mentoring artists, and fostering institutional and independent cultural initiatives.
Recent group show at ILOMOCA
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ started Independent Curatorial Manila™ as a nonprofit philanthropy while working for institutions simultaneously early on.
The Independent Curatorial Manila™ or ICM™ is a curatorial services and guide for emerging artists in the Philippines. It is an independent/voluntary services entity and aims to remain so. Selection is through proposal and a prerogative temporarily. Contact above for inquiries.
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