VWFA Kuala Lumpur presents

SECRET ROOMS AND HIDDEN MOTIVES
by Jason Montinola and Kaloy Sanchez

12 May – 9 June 2012

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.

There will be an exhibition opening on Saturday, 12 May at 3pm, followed by an artist talk from 4 – 5 pm, moderated by Eva McGovern, Head of Regional Programmes. Admission is free and open to the public.

The Third Eye

We all have secrets. Things we want to hide. Places, both physical and psychological, we seek to bury our most intimate thoughts or develop personal agendas. Such intense experiences of longing and isolation, of positive and destructive forces, 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.

The title of the exhibition references two creative points of origin: ‘secret rooms’ and ‘hidden motives’. Open to interpretation, a cursory glance of the works on display reveal each artist’s particular creative attractions, to one of these two themes. Montinola’s haunting and mysterious human subjects are potentially ridden with esoteric ‘hidden motives’ and the interiors of Sanchez’s raw and tragic self-portraits conceptually gravitate towards ‘secret rooms’. However, thematic crossovers are encouraged, as the title, provides an overall tone for the exhibition rather, than strict parameters to limit readings. The mood, therefore, is of personal isolation and evocative mystery, where the real slips into fantasy and illusion. But, ironically, these secrets and hallucinations are anchored, by a communal interest around a third sight, and the various truths that artists, through their alternative ways of looking at the world, can reveal. Montinola, literally removes and replaces eyes in unexpected areas across the faces and hearts of his sitters, whereas Sanchez, uses a curious triangle icon throughout his work, referencing this ability of heightened visual perception. Such faith in the potential of the creative mind, is due to the fact, that both, are traditional painters, studio based, and engrossed in the legacies of Old and Contemporary Masters from Caravaggio, Velázquez, Salvador Dali and Lucian Freud. By adapting various technical and atmospheric devices from the Baroque, Surrealism, Realism and Abstract Expressionism, Montinola and Sanchez create distinct visual commentaries, pushing themselves to new levels of ideological inquiry and formal inventiveness.

For the exhibition, Kaloy Sanchez contributes, self-portraits of the artist in emotional conflict, emphasised by stylistic choices that clash and compliment. Rejecting the distraction of colour, his monochromatic, film noir tableaus, combine loose Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes with striking figurative brilliance and psychological experience. Nude and 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. Whether curled and foetus-like, as if shielding blows from an unknown attacker or listlessly seated in tortured contemplation, he shares an intimate form of personal psychological turmoil. But, the source of his anxieties remain hidden, as these details are reserved for the artist himself. Only one work, Hearse and Herpes provide a constellation of visual icons that hint at meaning. However, by purposefully quoting the aesthetic devices of morphing forms, like his fellow artist Jason Montinola, Sanchez’s secrets are only further blurred and monumentalised. Audiences therefore, stand on the outside of this purposefully cryptic world, mesmerised by his therapeutic exercise of self-analysis.

Jason Montinola, rejects the personal for the imagined, and paints anonymous figures, haunted by writhing animals, eyes, skulls and flowers. Although indebted to the dramatic devices of Caravaggio and inspired, by the Infanta Margarita or daughter of the King and Queen of Spain, who is featured in some of his works, and lifted directly from Velázquez’s iconic 1656 painting, Las Meninas, Montinola’s world is that of Morpheus, the ruler of the dream world. Inspired by his own dreams, his surprising and unexpected visual juxtapositions are reminiscent of the legacies of Freudian psychoanalysis that pervaded Surrealist imageries. Producing a curious type of portraiture, Montinola’s plumbs the depths of the psyche unravelled and deformed, tragic and beautiful. Some of his figures have been taken from real life, in the form of the artist’s friends rendered anonymous, whereas others are pure fiction or partially concealed cameos, as per the earlier mentioned Spanish princess. Backgrounded by Eastern European landscapes, reimagined from the artist’s recent travels in the West, his hybrid forms alternate between the borders of psychosis and reason. Interweaving dream and nightmare, the true purpose of his works or intentions of his subjects, as with Sanchez, remains obscured, confined to the world of the uncanny.

As such, it is clear that, Montinola’s ambiguities and Sanchez’s anxieties are more about the act of concealment itself, of isolated thoughts and moments of solitude rather than revelation and confession. Their encoded messages, secret rooms and hidden agendas instead, point towards alternative ways of seeing. By obscuring the ‘truth’ and recreating reality they lead audiences down the rabbit hole into different modes of understanding and sensory experience. Providing only a partial insight into the emotional histories of both artists, their hypnotic visual sequence instead trigger a fascination with lies, deceit, shame, pain, sadness anger and passion. Such vices, inherent in everyone, prompt the consideration of our own skeletons in the closet, love letters hidden under the bed and secrets never to be told.

Eva McGovern
Head of Regional Programmes
Valentine Willie Fine Art