Paperweight 1
signed (lower right) 2014
mixed media on canvas
78" x 78" (198 cm x 198 cm)

PROVENANCE Pearl Lam Galleries
EXHIBITED Pearl Lam Galleries, ²hide, Co-organised by Artinformal Gallery, Singapore, November 22, 2014 - January 8, 2015
LITERATURE Ruoh Ling, Keong et al. ²hide. Singapore: Pearl Lam Galleries, 2014. Published to accompany the exhibition ²hide at Pearl Lam Galleries in 2014-15. Full color illustration and photo caption on page 36.
Thinking out of the Box Jose John Santos III From A Monumental Exhibition in Singapore José John Santos III is a prominent figure in Philippine contemporary art whose oeuvres are richly textured creations, often deceptively appearing as collages despite their oil on canvas medium. To establish his artistic intent, Santos utilizes a spectrum of juxtaposed elements, and his subjects, which were drawn from immediate environs, exhibit indications of wear, tear, and manipulation, each reflecting a distinctive past and scars bearing testimony to it. The enigmatic canvases of Santos are captivating with their sense of pristine craftsmanship and mysterious iconography. While they express a sort of surrealist bent, the fine artist has stated that his subjects do not come from dreams nor from the promptings of the subconscious. In fact, Santos draws the images from his everyday reality, which he represents and re-presents in a variety of slants, codings and symbols that may very well describe his inner musings and reflections of his surroundings. Paperweight invites its viewers to return to the visual artist’s curious observation of the word “hide.” For Santos, there is something unsettling about the twofold meaning of the aforementioned word: as a noun it suggests at once a surface; but as a verb it suggests a desire to conceal. A perplexing ambivalence between outside and inside, between revealing and concealing, is encountered in the word. As noted by Kenneth Tay in the catalog titled ²hide, “Our everyday veneer of familiar and ordinary objects are, in fact, never static but charged, each with the “hidden” potential to always become something other than themselves.” The artist intends to focus on the notion in which there seems to be something left that was not said, something else that is yet to be seen, thought, or articulated. In his recent works, Santos continues his explorations of mundane objects, not merely to reveal their histories but to perplex our perception and understanding of these everyday things. His work thus invites viewers to account for the formal and logical reasons that underlie objects that invade all aspects of life, including the most trivial ones. (P.I.R.)