Mexico profoundly affected his vision and in its fusion with his Oriental heritage, he crystallized his personal and maturing style. His effort toward unity and contemporary awareness served to define his unique quality as a painter.

In his Philippine paintings and in his constant returning to his native images, Tabuena reveals a disciplined sensibility of human poetic, refinement, fragility, transparency of color, piled perspectives, lightness of stylization, and economy of suggested abstraction. Radiant colors prismatically envelop his figures, obliterating their solidness and breathing into their existence an aura of poetic mirage.