To all the girls that BenCab loved before, here’s your swan song

BAGUIO, Philippines – For his 85th birthday, National Artist BenCab presented all of us with a birthday card of sorts. 

His exhibit last April 18 at his own museum was titled “Women of the Past,” but before you start singing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” to serenade him, he placed “Larawan Drawings by BenCab.”

The “Larawan” series of BenCab started when he was on self-imposed exile in London. As his wont, he frequented antique shops and flea markets there when he came upon studio portraits of Filipina women posed in stiff finery, their gazes mediated by colonial optics. 

From these “tokens of Empire,” BenCab was even able to find a travelogue of an unknown Britisher in Baguio in the 1920s, which he produced into a book with some of his drawings. 

His “Larawan” became a favorite series. For this, BenCab wrote in his artist statement: “In this series, WOMEN OF THE PAST foregrounds representations of the Filipina in the colonial era, depicted in moments of quiet routine and everyday tasks. Dressed in traditional garments such as the baro’t saya and the more formal traje de mestiza, they embody the grace and constraints of their historical milieu.”

What were once photographs of shy spectators in ternos were reoriented and put in the front. The larawan, especially the early paintings, were rendered in fidelity, but as the years passed, they put on headphones, showered with yellow confetti, and handed oriental fans. 

For BenCab, it has become a retrieval more than nostalgia.

What fascinates me with BenCab is his way with folds, either skin or fabric. They spill with lyrical excess, in the class of “Larawan,” reclaiming movement robbed by minutes of posing to a daguerreotype. 

For this latest series, he used handmade paper made by friend Nida Dumsang. 

BenCab said that it was difficult to draw with handmade paper. It wasn’t smooth, and the blotting was unpredictable. I almost answered, “But then, you’re BenCab — everything becomes smooth and easy.” But I stopped myself: Oh, yes, he is 85. 

Still, most of the drawings in “Women of the Past” were done in 2025 and 2026. Not as effortlessly deft as before but powerful in their spareness.

Most were carrying baskets and clay pots because, in the original photographs, they were there to bring refreshments to the spectators. The others were spectators, hiding their faces or turning their backs. Some were provided with a geometrical background in red. Only one was smiling and afforded a two-tone background.    

And because these are BenCab, when I arrived moments before the opening, a museum worker was already pasting red dots on all the paintings.

BenCab said he will keep two: one is a portrait of a lady in traje de mestiza looking leftward.

A visitor from Gajah Gallery reminded me that it was the same image lifted by Leslie de Chavez in his 2024 collage, “Flowers in the Garden of Exoticization.”

Writers have long described “Larawan” as a form of re-possession, a reclaiming of images once framed by colonial desire. 

At 85, BenCab complicates that reading. Re-possession, the exhibition suggests, is not a completed act. 

In the sunset of his career, BenCab reminds us that his dialogue with the women of his past is ongoing, uneasy, and necessarily incomplete. – Rappler.com