Master printmaker Benjie Cabrera won the Grand Prize at the 2024 ASEAN Graphic Arts Exhibition in Vietnam for his print Unspoken Longing. Under his leadership and mentorship at the Association of Pinoy Printmakers (AP), Cabrera has been among those overseeing the artist-in-residence group for the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), which has proven to be quite active and engaged.
Cabrera’s stalwart focus on printmaking is his bedrock, but his belief in this medium and technique is vital and relevant.
In his award-winning piece, the faces float amidst the collapse of time and space, where the Renaissance pattern of the checkerboard floor blends with what looks like undulating waves of fish scales. The precision dances with whimsy. This is the strength of Cabrera’s work—the ease of the nebulous and the non-distinct.
Unspoken Longing is a monoprint relief engraving. Cabrera studied engraving in France years ago, and his focus earned him the honorific of “master” in this highly specialized approach.
Though it is a strident technique, Cabrera is not one to shy away from the call of the contemporary to be responsive and adaptable. This contemporariness is apparent in how he produced Unspoken Longing, wherein he utilized different matrices or images from his past prints and reconfigured them into a distinct and pulsating image of yearning. This makes Cabrera’s works challenging to classify and not easily read, as he dances between the rigor of the figurative and the force of fanciful abstraction.
The human aspect in Unspoken Longing has three faces with three different gazes. The bottom section of the print has tints of what looks like dried blood or rust, with a face that stares not at you but through you. The middle face rests on a faded bed of green (the color of the generation) and looks at a far-off horizon with an open mouth, as if in a scream or awe. The third face is at the upper right of a man who gives a side glance directly at the viewer.
These three glances indicate how longing is expressed: one encounters it with awe, another is furtive with a side glance as if unsure of acknowledging it while looking directly at the viewer, and one with a sense of comfort in the vast horizon. All three cannot verbally express this witnessing articulately.
This is similar to what Romantics wrote about the “sublime.” The sublime happens at an encounter between mortal eyes, mortal feelings, and an immense unknown—something that makes one feel small and insignificant in the face of sheer power. This is much like gazing upon the rumbling clouds of a roiling typhoon, wherein the sky is both beautiful and dangerous. To feel small amidst immensity and intensity is the sublime. Longing here is the unspeakable force.
Amidst the flurry of abstracted floors, receding stairs, spirals, and chains dancing with ballasts, the landscape of Unspoken Longing is not of clear provenance, but that is what dreamscapes are, and dreams are unbridled longing that echoes from the subconscious.
Printmaking emerged centuries ago as a viable means of creating multiples. Still, Cabrera’s deft handling, the reproduction is no longer the point, but the iteration he invokes opens up avenues for printmaking to be more fluid and playful. These pliant scapes, planes, and florid paths suggest that Cabrera is comfortable with cosmogony or a point of emergence of something grand, like a universe, or something more succinct, a longing.
Printmaking was more graphic and literal representation, but Cabrera struck a distance from this and engaged with a more abstract unfurling. Unspoken Longing is a meditative piece of something that cannot be concretized or held, which is longing.
Amidst the flurry of the different frenetic lines, at the upper right, just next to the face that stares directly at you, is a lone butterfly, arguably the only figure that is complete (the faces are partial and blend with the patterns and shapes that surround them), suspended in flight in a void or into a cavern. What a tiny but poignant detail. What about a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world producing a hurricane on another? One thing leads to another, or what is longing but a string of encounters that dance through awe into different possible tangents?
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social
