We all have secrets. Things we want to hide. Places, both physical and psychological, where we bury our most intimate thoughts. Such intense experiences of longing and isolation, malice and sadness reflect the personal conflicts of the human mind. VWFA Kuala Lumpur is proud to present these mysterious tensions in Secret Rooms and Hidden Motives by Filipino artists Jason Montinola and Kaloy Sanchez. As both friends and respected colleagues, Montinola and Sanchez’s distinct styles orbit around a shared interest in painting as well as various states of revelation and concealment. Representing the next generation of Filipino painters coming into maturity, Montinola and Sanchez produce sensually disturbing work that is at once, strange and familiar, seductive and grotesque.

Following on from his 2011 solo at VWFA Kuala Lumpur, Kaloy Sanchez creates self-portraits of the artist in emotional conflict. Struggling with the burden of an unknown secret, trapped by the walls of his own limitations, he provokes an uncomfortable voyeurism, as viewers are lured through the keyhole to experience the artist at his most vulnerable. Jason Montinola however, rejects the personal for the imagined, and paints anonymous figures, haunted by writhing deformities. Inspired by classical European portraiture as well as Surrealist hallucination, his hybrid forms alternate between the borders of insanity and reason, dream and nightmare.

Engaging in a visual conversation of mutual and diverging preoccupations Secret Rooms and Hidden Motives seek to probe the recesses of the human mind. A visual psychoanalysis in progress, it provides insight into, not only the artists themselves, but our own skeletons in the closet, love letters hidden under the bed and secrets never to be told.

As both friends and respected colleagues, Jason Montinola and Kaloy Sanchez’s distinct styles orbit around a shared interest in painting, as well as various states of revelation and concealment. Representing the next generation of Filipino painters coming into maturity, Montinola and Sanchez produce sensually disturbing work that is at once strange and familiar, seductive and grotesque. The exhibition sees the pair grappling, in their own ways, with the legacies of Old and Modern Masters that they’re indebted to, with such influences including Caravaggio, Velázquez, Salvador Dali and Lucian Freud. Sanchez presents a series of distorted and exaggerated self-portraits captured in stages of emotional disturbance, while Montinola chooses to unsettle in a different way by presenting a series of anonymous portraits done in the style of Old Masters, but corrupted by a surrealist tint of misaligned features and exotic masks.