This exhibition revisits Roberto Chabet’s historical plywood installation, Waves, which was last presented in the survey show Art in the CCP: 1970 – 1975 at the Main Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in 1975. It provides a glimpse into one of the earliest manifestations of Chabet’s aporetic use of everyday objects, turning them into both material and metaphor for the vagrancies of contemporary life.

Born in Manila in 1937, Chabet studied Architecture at the University of Santo Tomas and graduated in 1961, the year he also held his first solo exhibition. As an architect, he had a natural affinity for basic construction materials and was trained to design spaces according to the plywood’s standard dimensions. As the most common material used for makeshift shelters in Manila’s poorest, ravaged districts, plywood also symbolized new order and reconstruction for the postwar generation. This context would frame much of Chabet’s work, particularly with plywood, which would become the main signature material for most of his installations.

Chabet first used plywood in the 70s as material for what was then termed as ‘environmental works.’ These early, large-scale installations occupied entire rooms at the CCP and collapsed the boundaries between traditional sculpture and theater. Appropriating devices from the stage and architecture, these works are not meant simply to be seen or looked at; they are mounted to be physically entered and experienced.

In his seminal piece entitled An Environmental Work (1972), Chabet filled the CCP Main Gallery with pale blue plywood planks suspended from pivots on the ceiling. The use of colored spotlights heightened the drama, creating drifting shadows as the planks naturally rotate and move. In this work, Ray Albano, then curator of the CCP, noted how Chabet instigates a dematerialization process “which transforms, as theater does, a material reality into a purely visual one.” By controlling the elements of the work, “questions of color, materiality and form, and imperfections disappear in the dark. There is just a situation made.”

In Waves (1975), Chabet continued to redefine three-dimensional space with a singular work that has a theatrical presence. Twenty-one plywood panels, each one with a distinct contour mimicking the undulations of the water’s surface, are hung in succession from the ceiling above the gallery’s central hallway. It is painted a similar, pale blue color like An Environmental Work, not merely to allude to the color of the ocean, but also because pale blue is said to be a color that receives all colors of light.

Chabet would later on adopt the material for use in works that problematized the dimensionalities of painting and sculpture. Plywood was cut into panels or shelves, painted in solid blocks of color, and often combined with other found objects, such as boats, clocks, maps, books, walking canes, and neon signs. By using “real materials in real space,” Chabet creates art that cuts through illusions, presenting itself not as a decoy, a substitute for reality, but also as reality in itself.

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