Carabao
signed and dated 1958 (lower left)
oil on wood
16" x 55" (41 cm x 140 cm)


PROVENANCE: Private collection, USA



Romeo Tabuena’s works during his “Mexican Period” are imbued with a mixture of his Neo-Realist sensibilities and an Oriental flair that ushered into full fruition as a result of his life in diaspora when he decided to settle permanently in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1955. Despite being thousands of miles from his motherland, Tabuena retained a genuine affiliation with his native culture by exalting rural scenes ubiquitous to his country. Tabuena’s scenes of the pastoral do not in any way bear any resemblance to the sunlit, romantic canvases of the Amorsolo school, which continued to flex its dominance even in the immediate post-war period. Instead, they carry the torch of a Neo-Realist affinity, to which Tabuena had aligned himself in the early 1950s as a reaction to the postwar milieu. This 1958 work titled Carabao, which Tabuena made just three years after he had settled in Mexico, displays the artist’s Neo-Realist inclination for distortion, fragmentation, and reconstruction mixed with an Oriental style akin to a Chinese ink wash painting, resulting in darkly toned and somber paintings that come out as deeply expressionist in essence. A herd of carabaos led by farmers, the latter possessing bodies rendered elongated and highlighted using a black palette, emphasizes their downtrodden situation. The resulting work shows Tabuena in touch not only with the time-honored traditions of his native land but, more so, his profoundly ingrained connection with his fellow people whose everyday lives and sustenance are struck by mercenary interests, especially in the context of the “newly liberated” Philippines of the post-war era. (Adrian Maranan)