SABAW SOUP CANS

This set of paintings is my Pinoy homage to Andy Warhol’s 32 Campbell's Soup Cans. I'm no stranger to parodying certain brands in my work, not that I don’t paint artworks with actual brand labels on them. I mostly do this in my more contemporary works like my Cat burglar series to edit the words in them turning them into cat puns. But this time I got the idea of changing the flavor of the soup cans into Pinoy-based soup dishes, like Sinigang, Tinola, Nilagang Baka, and the like.

My sentiment is almost identical to Warhol’s set, albeit in the more traditional sense. Warhol painted the soup cans as a way of reflecting the pop artists’ daily meal before he was the highest-priced living American artist of his time. As Filipinos we eat certain soups, not only it’s a sign of home cooking, but we also crave it when feeling under the weather or when we are experiencing another typhoon with its partners of cold winds and floods. Not only does a hot soup reinvigorate a Filipino’s everyday meal, but it can also fire one up for the day, as we slurp soups at carinderias all over Manila for workers in all kinds of fields.

For me, the most crucial thing we see here in this set is the "FREE SOUP". It just says truly Pinoy for me. Most, in case not all Filipino knows about the free soup that comes as we all enjoy our meals at restaurants and eateries. We all appreciate that hot soup readily available for free when our budgets can only afford so much. And seeing it in a Campbell Soup Can might seem an impossible thing because you have to buy it first of all, so how can it be free? But to me, it might say, that maybe in the future, some free soup in a carinderia out there will be so delicious, that people will flock to it that it will be a mainstay in Filipino soup cuisine. So much so that Campbell Soup will soon recognize, and adapt it like all of the other soups in this homage series.

The Filipino slang term “sabaw” is used to describe someone who is not thinking clearly or whose brain is not functioning properly. But Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans was a subject matter initially offended, in part for its affront to the technique and philosophy of abstract expressionism. That is not my goal in this series (nor did Warhol), for it to be something as an affront or an unwise parody. It might appear so but I only mean to reinvigorate the art of silk screen printing as one acceptable art form, which was masterfully made in collaboration with Peter Ramos, my father-in-law. As well as also injecting some much-needed witty humor into the scene, like some hot Sinigang soup on a cold rainy day.