Benedicto R. Cabrera, who signs his paintings “Bencab,” upheld the primacy of drawing over the decorative color. Bencab started his career in the mid-sixties as a lyrical expressionist. His solitary figures of scavengers emerging from a dark landscape were piercing stabs at the social conscience of a people long inured to poverty and dereliction. Bencab, who was born in Malabon, has christened the emblematic scavenger figure “Sabel.” For Bencab, Sabel is a melancholic symbol of dislocation, despair, and isolation–the personification of human dignity threatened by life’s vicissitudes, and the vast inequities of Philippine society. 

Bencab’s exploration of form, finding his way out of the late neo-realism and high abstraction of the sixties to be able to reconsider the potency of figurative expression had held out vital options for Philippine art in the Martial Law years in the seventies through the contemporary era. Some of his famous artworks are Crisis in Humanity, Sabel, Edo Gesture, Portrait of Caroline and Yellow Confetti. 

Recognitions that were awarded to Bencab were Gawar CCP Para sa Sining (Cultural Center of the Philippines Award for the Arts) in 1992, Philippine National Artist in 2006 and Honorary Doctorate of the Humanities, University of the Philippines in 2009.