1972 / Acrylic on paper / 30 x 23 centimetres / Artist: Benedicto Cabrera aka BenCab / Private collection

The period in BenCab’s life as expatriate in London served to impassion the artist’s patriotic soul. The discovery of a wealth of 19th-century photographs from colonial Filipiniana sparked a search for a national identity. BenCab appropriated these images into recomposed sepia enlargements or croppings that usually questioned the Filipino’s passivity at acculturation. The result was a body of acrylic paintings, called Larawan (Portrait), which animated the art audiences’ mixed response of nostalgic pride and self-criticism.

Brown Brothers’ Burden is one of the Larawan series. The title alludes to the Imperialist League’s assertion that it is the “white man’s burden” to civilize the savages of the Philippines. Unmasking “imperialist” intentions, BenCab reveals the “burden” to be the white man whose interests weigh heavily on the shoulders of the “little brown brothers,” a term borrowed from historian Leon Wolff. The painting depicts four natives carrying a white man in a suit and hat on a palanquin. Here the artist remains virtually faithful to his archival visual source, yet focuses on its contemporariness as a fossil photograph. This he achieves by enclosing the drawing within a hard-edge border design, and glazing the fine image with a filament of uneven washes and stains. Adept at fine portraiture, the artist has heightened the quiet pain in the brown men’s faces while he deletes the facial features of the white colonizer. Such fresh approach to looking at the past opened a vast vista of visual explorations on the national identity theme.