By Cid Reyes
A painting may conceal its history without fully surrendering it. Beneath a later application of color, an earlier decision may continue to exert its influence, even when the eye can no longer recover the original form. What appears before us as a finished image may contain the memory of another image, a possibility the artist entertained before choosing a different direction. In Benjie Cabangis’s recent paintings, now on view at Gallery C, Conrad Manila, this relationship between making and unmaking offers a way into a practice shaped by time, attention, and the delicate balance between what a painting reveals and what it withholds.
PENTIMENTO
Derived from the Italian word for repentance or a change of mind, pentimento describes an alteration made during a painting’s creation. An artist may cover an earlier form, reposition a contour, or abandon an entire compositional idea. Yet pentimento need not signify a correction. It may record the moment when an artist recognizes a possibility more compelling than the one initially conceived.
In her 1973 book, “Pentimento: A Book of Portraits,” Lillian Hellman extended this painterly phenomenon into a metaphor for memory. Our understanding of the past evolves as time reveals aspects of experience we could not previously recognize. An earlier perception gives way to a later one but does not simply disappear. It remains part of the history through which the present acquires meaning.
This is especially relevant to Cabangis’s process. He builds his paintings through successive applications of paint, scraping, and glazing, each intervention altering the surface and the possibilities available to him. A passage that once seemed satisfactory may become excessive, while a disturbed area may acquire unexpected vitality. The artist must decide whether to preserve the discovery, develop it, or allow it to recede. Painting becomes an exchange between intention and response, with each decision altering the conditions for the next.
What distinguishes this process is the importance of the intervals between gestures. Cabangis pauses to consider what the painting has become and what it might still become. Such stillness is not inactivity but concentrated judgment, a willingness to dwell in uncertainty rather than resolve it prematurely.
MINDFULNESS AND INTIMACY
Mindfulness, commonly associated with meditation, means attending carefully to the present experience without immediately yielding to habitual judgment or reaction. For an artist, it may mean recognizing that the impulse to add another mark stems not from artistic necessity but from impatience. The discipline lies as much in knowing when to refrain as in knowing when to act.
Mark Rothko once explained his decision to paint on a monumental scale by saying he wanted his paintings to be “very intimate and human.” His vast canvases were not intended merely to overwhelm the viewer with their size. They sought to draw the viewer into an encompassing experience, a space in which the painting could no longer be regarded as a distant object to be commanded.
Cabangis approaches intimacy differently. His paintings may seem modest beside Rothko’s monumental canvases, but their smaller scale does not diminish the psychological space they open. While Rothko draws the viewer into expansive fields of color, Cabangis invites a closer encounter with a surface’s accumulated life.
Successive applications, scrapings, and glazings preserve the traces of decisions made and reconsidered.
Intimacy, then, has less to do with physical dimensions than with the quality of attention a painting demands. By following the subtle relationships among color, texture, and form, the viewer enters imaginatively into the painting’s making. The restricted field becomes an occasion for concentrated perception, and looking begins to resemble the artist’s mindfulness.
THE MOMENT OF SEEING
The implications extend beyond the studio. In Zen Buddhism, satori denotes awakening, a direct apprehension of reality that breaks through habitual patterns of understanding. Equating the creation of an abstract painting with spiritual enlightenment would be simplistic. The more fruitful connection is that sustained attention can alter perception.
We often mistake recognition for seeing. We identify a shape, name an object, and assume that recognition has exhausted the experience. Yet we may know what we are looking at without attending to its particular qualities. Habit makes recognition efficient, but it can also diminish our sensitivity to what resists immediate explanation.
Cabangis’s paintings invite us to suspend that habit. A passage initially perceived as empty may gain density. A geometric shape may matter less as an object than as a force that alters the surrounding space. What changes is not necessarily the painting but the quality of awareness we bring to it.
The viewer cannot literally enter the artist’s consciousness, but can encounter the material consequences of his decisions. The surface bears the effects of what has been added, what has been obscured, and what continues to exert its presence. Through patient looking, we reconstruct part of the painting’s unfolding history and discover relationships a hurried glance would overlook.
In a culture saturated with images competing for instant recognition, this demand for patience is a quiet act of resistance. Cabangis asks us to stay with what we do not immediately understand, letting perception deepen before judgment intrudes. The painting’s apparent stillness conceals a complex history of choices, revisions, and unresolved possibilities.
THE MEMORY OF THE PROCESS
Pentimento gains significance beyond a painting’s physical history. It reminds us that an earlier state may still shape the present, even after another has taken its place. Mindfulness enables the artist to attend to these successive transformations, while the viewer’s sustained attention extends the experience beyond the canvas’s material boundaries.
The stillness Benjie Cabangis seeks is not an escape from change. He achieves it through change, repeatedly reconsidering a surface until its competing elements approach a provisional balance. Beneath that balance lies the memory of the process, the history of an artist learning when to intervene and when to let the work be.
Looking at these paintings means accepting that understanding need not arrive all at once. Sometimes the deepest encounter begins when the demand for an immediate answer falls away, and the eye learns to linger.
Visitors to Gallery C, Conrad Manila, will appreciate Benjie Cabangis’s work more in a quiet setting than in the bustling atmosphere of an opening night. The calmer post-event environment makes the paintings more accessible. Similarly, the Tate Modern displays Rothko’s works in a dim, intimate room designed to preserve their meditative quality. A collector of Benjie Cabangis’s art can also experience the peace of private, quiet time with his paintings.
Cid Reyes was selected by five National Artists—Arturo Luz, BenCab, J. Elizalde Navarro, Napoleon Abueva, and Fernando Amorsolo—to document their lives and artistic achievements. A graduate of San Beda College and De La Salle University, he studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and art history at London’s City Lit Institute.
From 1995 to 2004, Reyes wrote the weekly art column “Gallery-Hopping” for TODAY. He wrote Conversations on Philippine Art and has written or co-authored more than 40 art books and over 1,000 artist notes. His award-winning publications include TANAW: The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Art Collection and The Life and Art of Lee Aguinaldo, both of which received the Alfonso T. Ongpin Prize for Best Art Book. His book “MVP: The Man and His Art” received a Gold Stevie International Business Award in 2021.
His recent books feature artists including Ramon Orlina, Lydia Velasco, Prudencio Lamarroza, and Roy Veneracion, as well as “Tanglaw,” a volume on the GSIS Art Collection.
Reyes has been recognized as the Art Association of the Philippines’ Best in Art Criticism (1978) and as Art Quarterly Manila’s Critic of the Year (2001–2003). He has also received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Creative Guild of the Philippines and De La Salle University. A practicing artist with 20 solo exhibitions, he publishes “Conversations on Philippine Art,” co-created ArticulatePH, and serves as president of PAAFI (Promoting Art Advocacy Foundation, Inc.).
