In celebrating the 30th anniversary of the EDSA (also known as People Power) Revolution, Galleria Duemila and Yuchengco Museum are highlighting a conceptual art installation by Roberto M.A. Robles. Entitled Here is How the Transition into the Mambo Beat Looks Like 2016, the stark white plaster of paris and wood installation is on view at Yuchengco Museum’s lobby from January 27 to February 27, 2016.
Whether through painting, mixed media, sculpture, or art installation, artmaking is Robles’ way of expressing his own sentiments and personal relationship with the fight for democracy. In Here is How the Transition into the Mambo Beat Looks Like 2016, the artist alludes to events and symbols of Martial Law and the EDSA People Power Revolution of 1986. One part of the installation, called The Running Fence, was sparked by Robles’s memory of the Marcos years, when fence after fence was erected on the Manila streets he knew as a boy.
The title “Here is How the Transition into the Mambo Beat Looks Like 2016” refers to an exhibit of the same title mounted three decades ago, in 1986. In a Dadaist act, Robles randomly chose the title phrase from a book. According to Robles, the current exhibit is “still moves to the beat of mambo music towards emancipation.” The repetition of various elements in the installation, like the structure of mambo music, follows our “ups and downs towards nationalism.”
Robles’ intention is “to express the struggle of each Filipino to uphold, to remove the fence of ignorance, to set the spirit free” His hope is for museum visitors to think about the installation’s symbolism of fences and barriers that block freedom of mind and ideology; and of chairs and tables that offer dialogue in our fight for true democracy.
About Roberto M.A. Robles
Roberto Marcelo Afable Robles pursued fine arts at the University of the East in the Philippines and sculpture at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. In 1986, he won the Grand Prize for Mixed Media in the Art Association of the Philippines Open Art Competition. An accomplished artist, his work has been exhibited at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center, the 17th Asian International Art Exhibition at the Daejeon Municipal Museum of Art in South Korea, Jiyu Group Exhibitions at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum in Japan, and at the Beaux Art L’art dans le Monde Pont Alexandre III in Paris, France. His oeuvre has been surveyed in a retrospective show at the Ateneo Art Gallery in 2011. Robles has been represented by Galleria Duemila since 1995.
Here is How the Transition into the Mambo Beat Looks Like 2016 is on view at Yuchengco Museum lobby from January 27 to February 27, 2016. The museum is located at RCBC Plaza, corner Ayala and Sen. Gil J. Puyat Avenues, Makati. Museum hours are Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call (632) 889-1234 or visit www.yuchengcomuseum.org.
