Roberto Chabet
Box Paintings
The box form is a basic containment unit that defines space. Hence a room may be considered a box. A frame boxes a picture, a window frames a room. The camera obscura is a box contraption that projects images of its surroundings on a screen, which then imprints it on a medium to record the projected image though in reverse view. Vermeer was speculated as to have used such a device for his magnificent attention to detail in his paintings, which were window views to the illuminated interior domesticity of Dutch daily life in the 17th century, or as curtained tableaus to an allegory of painting such as in The Art of Painting.
Joseph Cornell ‘s boxes are compendiums of time and memory, and “of shadows of forgotten dreams” patinated or rendered mysterious and precious by their very juxtaposition in the boxed confines of his dioramas that intuit to a greater personal mythology.
Roberto Chabet’s exhibits from the 1990s to 2007 in the adjacent galleries of Finale and West in Megamall were often compared or viewed as Cornell boxes as they were simultaneously held, offering twin views of life-sized “assemblages” that either complement each other, or seen as seamless causal trajectory utterances of each other, visually enunciated metaphors/allegories in “viewing” and the very assimilation of such spectacle within existence itself, or on the ruminations of art history vis-à-vis the course of human history or civilization.
The box form had been a recurrent motif, a visual device for Chabet, which can be gleaned from his ziggurat works (another recurrent form, which had been recently exhibited in West Gallery last March), as boxes, in diminishing sizes like matryoshka dolls sitting on top of each other, as a built mountain reaching up to touch the sky, or as how he prefers to frame his collages in box-type frames of bleached wood, a seeming Cornell box with time compressed unto a single page.
In this latest installment, Box Paintings, one of the exhibits that commemorate 50 years of his art practice, boxes sized 12” x 9” x 9”, all painted in primary colors, white and black, are arranged in 3s and randomly scattered or hung on the walls of Mag:net Gallery.
The boxes are intentionally left blank, as to strip them off for the unmitigated meditation of their form; light and shadow would suffice to fill the otherwise void. But what is the void? Chabet himself has said of these boxes as “emptied of its contents”, but are they really “emptied of its contents”, and if they are emptied of its contents, do they echo instead Alexander Rodchenko’s declaration for painting’s end: "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting." Hence, are these boxes coffins for painting’s demise? Perhaps it was for a certain painting at that time of Rodchenko’s declaration as he aspired for a utopia of forms, for an absolute maxim of void and fullness, a plastic revolution in liberating painting from the confines of the easel and the picture window view.
But for Chabet, an individual box is a box painting, a painting in itself, content and form in itself. Unlike Donald Judd’s boxes which the latter calls as “objects”, not sculpture or painting but “objects”, things taken matter-of-factly for their minimal qualities and the process by which they were produced, undifferentiated from factory made products, but clear-cut as it were of its own essence in its very form, no superfluous pronouncements, no metaphors, no nothing but the object in and of itself.
This idea of seriality is one of Minimalism’s tropes in championing form over anything else. It recalls or stresses the impersonal and industrial qualities by which they were made, as though uniqueness of a certain object or its very essence can be capitulated in one but given full body when they come in numbers or in succession, as one thing after another, like the waves of aluminum sheets carpeting the floor of Finale (in his other show Onethingafteranother), forming a silver sea illuminating a boxlike interior.
One thing after another – it can either be a string of attributes compiled, or as an accumulation of attributes to define the perfect form, as espoused by Umberto Ecco’s Infinity of Lists, especially when general qualities are undefined and there’s no other way to fully describe an object other than through a list, which is but an attempt to rationalize the world, for “behind each list is the essence of ineffability”. As such, he states painting as having “beauty that is born of accumulation” for “art embodies the plurality and variety of reality in the limits of the form. From antiquity down to the 19th century we have been prisoners of the picture frame; in painting, the frame tells us that ‘everything’ we should be interested in is inside it. “
It wasn’t through monochrome paintings that Rodchenko killed painting or declared it dead. It was actually through finding a form that can contain infinity; only a perfect form can contain such.
(Exhibition notes by Lena Cobangbang)
Box Paintings is organized by King Kong Art Projects Unlimited as part of Chabet: 50 Years, a series of exhibitions in various venues in Singapore, Hong Kong and Manila throughout 2011 – 2012 in celebration of Roberto Chabet’s fifty years of pioneering conceptual work and his role in shaping Philippine contemporary art. For further information, email chabet.50years@gmail.com or log on to www.kingkongartprojects.org.
Opening: May 5, 2011, 6 pm
Exhibition Dates: May 5 – 28, 2011
Mag:net Gallery – Agcor Building, 335 Katipunan Ave., Quezon City. Tel. +632 9293191, www.magnetgalleries.com 
