Portrait of the artist as passionate thinker

Benedicto “Bencab” Cabrera finds the past both alluring and mystifying as shown by his artistic oeuvre, but he is just as passionate about the present and the future as shown by his involvement in Bonifacio Global City’s Mind Museum.

“I like the idea of a museum that involves the artists’ vision in terms of creating a more friendly and creative approach to science,” Bencab explains. Science sometimes comes across as a daunting beast, sometimes verging on the unapproachable and incomprehensible. Either crushingly boring or scary for most people. (Remember the Thomas Dolby song She Blinded Me With Science?) What the Mind Museum aims to do is to “boost creativity, resourcefulness and originality by demonstrating that science education can be fun.”

Bencab agrees. He says if you’re going to present something like a bubble machine, the artist will be able to come up with a nicer, more creative interpretation. “We always put aesthetics into the equation.”

The Mind Museum is a project of the Bonifacio Art Foundation Inc. (BAFI). The foundation was established by Fort Bonifacio Development Corporation (FBDC), which is the developer of Bonifacio Global City (BGC). The extraordinary art pieces that can be seen all over BGC and Bonifacio High Street are also BAFI’s projects, part of its drive to heighten artistic awareness and appreciation among the public.

The Mind Museum shall be completed by 2010 at the western end of Bonifacio High Street, right across the upcoming Shangri-La Hotel, and will be site of ingenious exhibitions that would “provide fresh insight, encourage enthusiasm and create a passion for learning,” which is something consistent with Bonifacio Global City’s goal of becoming the “home of passionate minds.” Like Bencab who is a member of the Mind Museum’s exhibit advisory council (along with other experts in the academe, the arts, science and technology, and the corporate world).

Bencab first discovered that painting would be a lifelong passion just right after leaving UP in 1966, working for the Sunday Times Magazine as an illustrator, and setting up his own gallery (with brother Salvador and friend Bibsy Carballo) called Indigo in Mabini right next to Indios Bravos frequented by Filipinos with brilliant minds such as Nick Joaquin, Virgie Moreno and Larry Francia, among others. You could just imagine the discussions going on within that area. Nick talking about the strange geographies of old Manila in apocalyptic sentences while emptying one auburn bottle of Pale Pilsen after the other, while next door was Bencab presenting his groundbreaking paintings in oil and acrylic in his first one-man show at Indigo. “When my paintings started selling that was when I first discovered I could earn a living from something that I love doing,” Bencab says.

And the rest isn’t mystery. Most Filipinos know that Bencab is one of the greatest living artists in our country. The Baguio-based artist has mounted successful exhibits here and abroad, and was conferred the National Artist award in 2006 for his artistic achievements. In short, he is an institution. If Malang has his fruit vendors and women with big feet symbolic of industriousness and perseverance in the face of hardships, Bencab has an ongoing love affair with a woman called Sabel (a bag lady-scavenger suffering from mental illness who was to become a lifelong muse) which had its genesis in 1964 when the artist moved to Yakal in the Bambang area.

“I used to see her from the window of our house,” he recalls. Bencab felt pity for her but also felt fascination. “It was the mysteriousness in her. I took photographs of her with one of my first cameras.”

From being a mysterious woman seen from a window, Sabel became a metaphor. Dislocation. Despair. Isolation. Depends on the viewer, really. For Bencab, Sabel stands not only for “humanism, the loneliness of the dispossessed,” but as a subject with a form that is open to different renderings and executions. Nowadays, the figure has become a vessel in which Bencab the artist — who also dabbles in photography and cultivating bonsai plants — uses for more and more experimentation. “It has become my mark, and a mannerism as well. Sometimes when I draw, it comes out automatically.”  

How has Bencab retained his passion for reinventing himself as an artist? He says it is mainly out of curiosity and a fascination for discovering new things. Exposure to different types of art is one factor; reading is another. In one of his most recent exhibits at Silverlens, the artist used large-scale photos juxtaposed with equally large-scale drawings. Encouraged by Crucible Gallery owner Sari Ortiga, Bencab is thinking of going into sculpture. So we might just see Sabel in all her three-dimensional glory someday. He says, “That’s a new challenge for me.”

Enters another new challenge in the involvement in the Mind Museum. Museum curator and STAR science columnist Maria Isabel “Maribel” Garcia recalls, “I approached Bencab two years ago when I came out with Science Solitaire, a book on the public understanding of science. I was curious about what the artist’s take on science was. We became friends. And when I became curator, I asked him if he could be part of our council. He agreed. We recently had a design powwow to achieve design coherence. We had about 50 artists with different works and Bencab stayed and evaluated each work, very generous in giving advice.” 

That’s how much involved the artist is in the project.

Bencab concludes, “When I read Maribel’s book, I really enjoyed it because she explained science in layman’s term. The simpler, the better. The same can be said about the Mind Museum. Artists contribute in making the presentations at the museum more approachable. This will be the very first science museum in the country that has its own building and it will teach science in a way that is very interesting to kids and adults as well.”

Imagine five galleries filled with artistic presentations about Life, the Earth, the Universe, Atom and Technology. Installations that would demystify science and debunk all the balderdash associated with it, making it as fun as a Douglas Adams novel, as entertaining as MythBusters, and more accessible to us Filipinos. Made possible by the vision of Bonifacio Global City, the leadership of curator Maribel Garcia and the contribution of a National Artist like no other.

All in the Mind Museum.