He is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. His early drawings were playful linear works. His minimalist, geometric abstractions allude to modernist virtues of competence, order, and elegance. His works evoke a universal reality and mirror a truly Asian modernity. He won First Prize at the First International Art Salon in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1962. He received the Republic Cultural Heritage Award in 1966. Some of his best known paintings are Street Musicians, Venezia, City, and Cyclists. A book of his drawings, with an introduction of by Emmanuel Torres, was published in 1956. He was founding director of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila until 1986, and held a retrospective exhibition there in 1995.
