Photograph of Roberto Chabet's installation Day and Night in the exhibition 'To Be Continued' at the Cultural center of the Philippines, 19 January - 31 March 2012.

In Day and Night, Chabet assembles his familiar GI sheets and neon texts with objects culled and salvaged from long-forgotten situations: a Jose Rizal magic slate that serves as a palimpsest of lost writings, school desks that allegorize flagellant hours and wanting to be somewhere else, and cast off ship bells that alert arrivals and departures. The neon sign decoys to cultic and psychological transformations, but is the namesake of a house of nightly pleasures that is leveled after World War II. It is a tableau of signs that re-engage and re-enact the makeshift walls of a classroom from a childhood memory. The installation’s host of meanings, anachronistic and synchronous, highly sentimental and romantic, objectifies ‘a greater personal mythology’.

The work was first exhibited at Paseo Gallery, SM Megamall from 1 - 11 December 2011, and was re-installed in the 'To Be Continued' exhibition at CCP.
'To Be Continued' is a landmark survey exhibition of Chabet's works, which gathers seminal pieces such as Russian Paintings (1984) and Cargo and Decoy (1989), as well as other works that utilise plywood boards, a material, which has become not only the surface and support of his paintings and installations, but to a large extent their subject matter and content. He first used plywood in his early kinetic sculptures in the 1970s, but it was in the 80s when he adapted the material to painting. Breaking away from the rigid formalism of Modernism, his seemingly ‘purely’ geometric and abstract plywood constructions are often juxtaposed with particular everyday objects that would appear and re-appear in his other installations and become part of his familiar inventory of anxious objects. Highlighting process and the provisional nature of these works, the exhibition illuminates a key aspect of Chabet’s practice, which gives precedence to the fugitive and contingent nature of art.

Also included in the CCP mounting are a selection from Chabet’s China Collages (1980 – 1990), a series of large collages done over a ten-year period; Bakawan (1974), a closed door installation in the CCP Small Gallery; and the Apple Painting Lesson (1983), an early collaborative work with over forty artists. The CCP Little Theater Curtain, which was designed by Chabet, is also highlighted. 

'To Be Continued' was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore - La Salle College of the Arts on January 2011 and Osage Kwun Tong on August 2011. The exhibition returned to Manila as the final installation of 'Roberto Chabet: Fifty Years,' a year-long series of exhibitions organised by King Kong Art Projects Unlimited in various venues in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manila from 2011 - 2012.