Kaloy Sanchez, His Missives, And More at West Gallery

Kaloy Sanchez likes to be alone.  The twenty-nine-year-old artist recluses himself in his studio, painting the environment that exists within what he calls a bubble, the world that encompasses only his immediate surroundings.  He hardly ventures out, not even for the receptions that open his group shows.  He chooses to keep largely to himself despite his recent rise into the consciousness of Manila’s art collectors.

In March of this year, Kaloy mounted Too Loud A Solitude, his first solo exhibit in Kuala Lumpur, at vwfa (Valentine Willie Fine Art).  He persuaded two people in his neighborhood to sit for him— a wrinkled alcoholic man with a mop of white hair, and a transvestite who works at a dance club.  The sessions resulted in a series of stark, melancholic portrayals.  Rendered by Kaloy in acrylic and graphite, in monochromatic gray tones, his subjects sit naked, looking away from the viewer.  The powerful images recall Lucien Freud’s unflattering portraits.  “There’s something more honest about being naked.  They’re shedding something that they only reveal to me.”

“I call these paintings double portraits.  There is a dynamic between the artist and the sitter.  I don’t just paint stories about my sitters, but also stories about me.  They’re also in their own solitude, their own little boxes.”  Kaloy embedded images from his own person onto these paintings; he used his tattoos to leave his imprint on his subjects.

When I interviewed him two months ago, Kaloy intended his last show of the year to carry traces that pertain to the search for the unicorn.  Something must have come up in the course of his preparations.  Missives To The Ocean, This Time Last Year, now running at West Gallery, seems more of an extension of his previous exhibits, the earlier one in KL and 2010’s powerful To The Memory of Sin.  Again, his paintings depict subjects seated in Kaloy’s living room, reclining in his favorite pieces of furniture. Could this explain why he refers to the past year in his title?

The appeal of Kaloy’s paintings come from the combination of the romantic and the brutal that exudes from his work.  Perhaps Kaloy should rediscover the world beyond his bubble, paint as he did for 2009’s Black Water Cross, also at West Gallery.  He limned victms of a massive flood, works that antedated the destruction of Typhoon Ondoy by several months.

Three other exhibits run concurrent to Kaloy’s:  Carina Santos’ Excavations From The End of The World, in Gallery 4, brings us collages from spliced hardcovers that she first showed in this year’s Manilart, Luis Santos installs painted skulls on slabs of wood for Modular/Variations in Gallery 3, and Erik Sausa’s paintings and assemblages for Something Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts in Gallery 2.

A version of this post appears in the December 2011 issue of Town And Country Philippines.  Visit https://www.facebook.com/#!/townandcountry.ph

Missives To The Ocean This Time Last Year, Something Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts, Modular Variations, and Excavations From The End of the World run from 6 to 30 December 2011 at West Gallery, 48 West Avenue, Quezon City.  Phone (632) 411-0336 or visit http://www.westgallery.org

Exhibit installation view

Kaloy Sanchez, "Endless"

Kaloy Sanchez, "Butaka"

Kaloy Sanchez, "Self-Portrait"

Kaloy Sanchez, "AMSS"

Installation view of small works

Erik Sausa, "Green Grass Home"

By Luis Santos

By Luis Santos

By Carina Santos

Carina Santos, "And Everyone Will Go Except Me"

 

 

 

One comment on “Kaloy Sanchez, His Missives, And More at West Gallery

  1. Pingback: Nothing Spaces » EXCAVATIONS FROM THE END OF THE WORLD, PT. 2.

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