Art Review

Mindanaoan Artist in Lexicon of Surrealism

By Phillip Somozo

At a time when Manila is rocked by controversies surrounding the questionable declaration of some personalities as National Artists, a Davao-born art talent quietly carved a niche among history’s greatest surrealists. His stuttering childlike speech, incompatible with his towering 6-foot height, sometimes amuses people. But today, Bienvenido Banez, Jr., towers all the more for achievements uncommon among Filipino artists.

Diagnosed with mild learning disability during childhood, Ben’s focus of attention has always been his art. Rightly so. In 2002, he won first place in the Asian Fellowship Painting Competition of the prestigious Vermont Studio Center launched from Vermont, USA. Last year, in New York City, where he based himself after his Vermont fellowship, he was the only Filipino among the more than seventy international, surreal visual artists featured in the grandest-ever birth anniversary celebration of John Milton and what is considered as the greatest English poem, his Paradise Lost (see photo).

Earlier, in 2004, the president and executive director of Williamsburg Art & Historical Center in Brooklyn, NYC, while viewing Ben’s painting, commented to a fashion photographer that Banez is the “greatest living surrealist from the Philippines.” This comment from contemporary Surrealis ...

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