Ripple-maker and son

MANILA, Philippines - Or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream.

I heard that recently (a version by The Colourfield, not by some chick warbling with elevator music) and I didn’t know it would presage an early evening to be spent at the Altro Mondo Arte Contemporanea in Greenbelt 5.

On view at the gallery until April 29 is “Pamana” featuring the artworks of the late artist Salvador Cabrera and his son Jojo Ayllon Cabrera. Salvador, you see, is deemed as the artistic “ripple-maker” in the family.

He was certainly a huge influence on his brother, Benedicto “BenCab” Cabrera, National Artist for Visual Arts. Waves were set in motion in the Cabrera household of yore.

“He really introduced me to the arts. I used to watch him draw, and it was like magic — from a blank piece of paper came out something,” BenCab shares. Both artists were, pun intended, drawn to figurative drawing. Salvador, who died 28 years ago, was 13 years older than the younger Cabrera. He was BenCab’s kuya.

BenCab and nephew Jojo Ayllon Cabrera at the opening of “Pamana”

“I was just happy to see him draw. Then I started drawing also, and he gave me pointers in anatomy. But he chose to be a Mabini artist; he liked the bohemian life. When I was in high school, he would take me around Mabini and say, ‘Here are the real artists.’”  

Salvador made a name for himself as a painter and illustrator, becoming one of the country’s top cartoonists in the ’50s and was characterized as a “quick-draw” artist. He co-created the character “Bindoy” with Emilio “Abe” Aguilar Cruz. 

BenCab laments how much Salvador is underrated as an artist. “His watercolors are excellent, even his early paintings for Mirror Magazine… ang gaganda.”

The son, Jojo, explains what the method was in laying out the father’s artworks in Altro Mondo. “We started with the pencils and they flowed through the watercolors and then through the oils. Same with my own artworks. Pencils are my bread-and-butter. I started working in advertising 20 years ago, and I’m still doing it.”

When Jojo was still in high school, he used to stretch his dad’s canvases, painted backgrounds, hung out in his gallery, gleaned encounters with famous names such as Abueva and Tolentino, and absorbed everything he could about technique from the elder Cabrera.

“Christ” by Salvador Cabrera

“Clay, linseed oil — they were a part of my childhood. That’s why I took up architecture in college, because I could easily learn about art from my dad,” explains Jojo. “Importante naman sa ating mga artists ‘yung knowledge about materials. Otherwise you can’t create anything.”

He also cleaned Salvador’s dirty brushes. Jojo would take the accumulated paint from his dad’s palette and doodle abstracted portraits across canvases. “I use to sign my paintings with a red dot. Nabibili naman ng foreigners (laughs).”

Now, Jojo works with acrylics most of the time, and he recently got into sculpture.

The younger Cabrera’s sculptures are quite unique. He created them using “post-consumer materials.” Eh? Garbage to many of us.

“Post consumer materials are things that are mostly disregarded in everyday life, but this should not be the case. I believe that now is the time to work with these found objects around us. You could be surprised with the things that could be done with them,” Jojo points out.

Plastic, wood, metal and whatnot… You can find anything in the artist’s sculptures. Bonded by liquid cement. Shiny and steely. Warriors ready to do battle with samurais and conquistadores.

“Old Man” by Salvador Cabrera

Jojo made use of storyboarding — an advertising/filmmaking/animation tool — in creating his sculptures, allowing him to see angles, the paths of shapes.

The exhibit not only amplifies the Cabreras’ personal affair with art in the family, but, according to Salvador’s aughter Carla, “an expression of transcendence of art in the family.”

She recalls how joyful, playful and charismatic her father was. “My dad was a ripple-maker, and Jojo is a clear manifestation of a legacy passed on. It’s a continuing story of creativity, artistry and imagination in the Cabrera family.”

Looking at the phalanx of faces inside the gallery, what hits you about Salvador Cabrera’s portraits of vendors, mothers and children, is the roundness of the eyes, predating the cutesy animated figures on comic books and TV with larger-than-regulation orbs, expressing something you can’t quite put your finger on. So it goes, writes Kurt Vonnegut. More than meets the eye.

A circle in a spiral? Or a wheel within a wheel? Not really sure. With art, sometimes the question is far more profound than the answer.

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“Lady in Cloak” by Jojo Ayllon Cabrera