Secret Rooms and Hidden Motives

Jason Montinola and Kaloy Sanchez
Blanc Gallery | 12 September 2026

In 2012, Jason Montinola and Kaloy Sanchez mounted Secret Rooms and Hidden Motives at Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur. At the time, the exhibition brought together two young Filipino painters whose practices, distinct as they were, shared an interest in revelation and concealment, in images that could feel simultaneously familiar and strange, beautiful and unsettling.

Fourteen years later, they return to the same title.

It would be tempting to call this a sequel. Perhaps it is. But Secret Rooms and Hidden Motives in 2026 is less a continuation of an exhibition than a return to a question: what remains of an artist after time has done its work?

Much has happened between these two shows.

The world that Montinola and Sanchez inhabited in 2012 is almost unrecognizable from the one we occupy today. There was, of course, that wonderfully absurd anxiety that 2012 itself might mark the end of the world. For a moment, the end of the Mayan calendar became shorthand for the end of everything as we knew it.

The world did not end.

At least, not then.

Instead, it changed.

A pandemic interrupted the ordinary rhythms of life. Technology accelerated. Artificial intelligence entered the cultural imagination and began challenging some of our most basic assumptions about authorship, creativity and the uniqueness of the human hand. The local and international art worlds expanded, contracted and reorganized themselves. Tastes changed. Markets changed. Audiences changed. New artists emerged while others disappeared from view.

And beyond these large historical movements came the quieter, more consequential changes of individual lives. Marriage. Fatherhood. Responsibility. Loss. Discovery. Age. The slow accumulation of experience.

Montinola and Sanchez changed too.

And yet, somehow, they remained themselves.

Jorge Luis Borges once imagined time not as a straight road but as an infinite network of possibilities:

“This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility.”

There is something particularly fitting about Borges’ conception of time when looking at these two exhibitions fourteen years apart. The 2012 show and the 2026 show can almost be imagined as two rooms connected somewhere along that web. One contains the artists they were. The other contains the artists they have become. Between them are innumerable paths taken and abandoned, circumstances chosen and imposed, influences absorbed and resisted.

Yet certain things persist.

For both Montinola and Sanchez, painting remains a way of entering those spaces that are difficult to completely articulate: the psychological, the mysterious, the uncomfortable, the imagined. Their visual languages have matured, but something essential survives beneath them. The impulse to make images remains. So too does the tension between what is revealed and what remains concealed.

Perhaps these are the real secret rooms.

An artist spends a lifetime accumulating influences, studying histories, confronting masters, absorbing images and attempting, consciously or otherwise, to understand where they belong within all of it. Early in a career, influence can resemble destination. One looks outward in search of what one might become.

But time complicates that ambition.

In attempting to master their influences, Montinola and Sanchez eventually arrive somewhere more interesting. They become not what they once sought to emulate, but increasingly, and unmistakably, themselves.

There is a certain inevitability to this.

Within these Secret Rooms and Hidden Motives, Montinola and Sanchez are confronted once again with what may have been waiting for them all along: their destiny as artists.

Fourteen years ago, they entered these rooms as artists coming into their own. Today they return as men whose lives have expanded far beyond the studio, carrying with them everything that has happened since.

The title has not changed.

The world has.

They have.

And somehow, they are still here, painting.

Perhaps that is the hidden motive after all.

Written by: Rg Gabunada