no title (umbrellas) is a reconstruction of Roberto Chabet’s installation first presented as part of the Side B group exhibition, which he curated at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1987. Composed of several common black umbrellas, each weighed down with stones and hung upside down from plywood planks suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, the work recalled his early kinetic installations in the 70s, such as An Environmental Work (1972), Bakawan (1974), and Waves (1975). In these works, he transformed space and incorporated light and movement as integral elements, creating not just a purely visual experience but also an immersive environment.

Chabet’s umbrellas also refer to the famous line, “As beautiful as a chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” by French poet Comte de Lautréamont, whose writing had a major influence on the Surrealists. This incongruous pairing prompted André Breton to declare the surreal condition as moment of “resolution of two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, in a kind of absolute reality, a super-reality.” Max Ernst likewise defined it as “a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them.” 

The role of chance and the enforced juxtaposition of entirely unrelated objects became the guiding principles of Surrealism and informed much of Chabet’s own practice as well. In his installations and collages, he challenged rational order and preconditioned perceptions of what constitutes art and reality by bringing together a trove of “anxious objects”– plywood panels, shelves, boats, clocks, canes, parachutes, mirrors, neon signs, arrows, bells, envelopes, maps, books, photographs, drawings, torn magazine pages, and other detritus of modern life. He sought meaning not only in the banal materiality of these objects but in the unexpected slippages brought on by their chance connections.