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Finale Art File exhibits the artworks of the late artist, curator, and professor Roberto Chabet, deemed the “Father of Filipino Conceptual Art”, in a humble display
The line between art and architecture remains thin, especially for the late Roberto Chabet, the “Father of Filipino Conceptual Art”. More intimately known as Bobby, he's a master of his craft: a renowned conceptual artist acknowledged as one the most influential Filipinos of the postwar generation.
From studying architecture for his college education at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) to eventually focusing on his artistic passion, he proved that he's a progressivist pursuing his dreams.
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In 1961, the same year he graduated from UST, he launched his first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in Manila. His short stint in an architectural firm allowed him to venture into the world of art. As an architect under Angel Nakpil’s firm, the same office tasked to reconstruct Manila after the war, he was inspired by the people around him who rigorously took on the arduous task of giving the city back its identity.
Due to these tasks, Chabet embraced the values of modernity—not to re-construct tradition, but to build from the ruins and psychic debris that were the actual state of things within a moment.
Above Archival photo of Roberto "Bobby" Chabet with his pieces from 'House Paintings'. (Photo: Finale Art File)
Archival photo of Roberto "Bobby" Chabet with his pieces from 'House Paintings'. (Photo: Finale Art File)
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Thus, these values would find their way into his art instead of architecture. One of the more prominent works they would manifest was in a series of untitled art pieces called House Paintings, which was first introduced in 1969.
House Paintings and Drawings
From March 8 to 29, 2023, Finale Art File opened its gallery to showcase Roberto Chabet's pieces from his House Paintings and Drawings. This exhibition highlights the entirety of Chabet's art practice presented from various angles.
Art is an ongoing process regardless of medium or form, a philosophy in art and life which Chabet embodies. This explains some recurring subjects in his drawings, paintings, installations, and collages. The repetition through the different artworks would become one of the most significant and memorable pieces in his long and productive practice.
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In all his works are the vital components of house construction, most of the time the useless and dissociated items: nails, hollow blocks, plywood, roofs, metal sheets, and even shelves. Chabet then renders them into art.
His passionate quest for acquiring meaning not just in abstraction but also in the value of commonplace objects in everyday life allowed him to show that there is art in everything.
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According to Finale Art File, as his works are stripped to their bare appearances, they appear anti-monumental, against the whole, and more indebted to the cause of autonomy and simplicity of rarely celebrated building blocks. It could be stated that they are the expressions of what seems to be an orderly collapse.
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Throughout his career, Chabet presented his works as raw and straightforwardly as possible. They never really represent any tangible thing.
Finale Art File describes them as devoid of illusions, merely lines, shapes, drawings, indexes, and decoys. It showcases "art as decoy", one of the prevailing concepts in most of Chabet's exhibitions.
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Credits
Photography: Finale Art File
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Angela Nicole Regis Guiral is the assistant digital editor of Tatler Philippines. She studied journalism and has since written features that look closely at how culture, lifestyle and social impact converge, while occasionally wandering into the worlds of style and travel.
