Jose John Santos III (b. 1970)
Woman in Yellow
signed and dated 2002 (lower right)
oil on canvas
24" x 13 1/2" (61 cm x 34 cm)



PROVENANCE:Private Collection, Manila



As one of the most innovative voices in Contemporary Filipino Art, Jose John Santos III has fashioned his own iconic visual language, which combines references to art, culture, history, and contemporary life. While his works may come off as cryptic or ambiguous at first, there is a mysterious allure to the process of decoding and demystifying the underlying meaning or ethos of his enchanting pieces. In this particular piece, Santos presents us with two figures inspired by colonial and/ or turn-of-the-century photographs. Both figures are wearing traditional baro’t saya clothing and posed in a traditional, if not distinguished, manner. The work is indicative of the texture of history and the dialectical relationship between the East and the West. The figures themselves can be seen as juxtaposition between our colonial heritage through the history of the garments they wear and even the cultural implications of portraiture, and the ancestral roots of both our physical and social bodies. Here they are conflated in some kind of a balancing act; a combination of visuality and textuality that investigates their mutuality and apparent dichotomy. Read as a veritable page of its own, the painting posits a transcendental union of some kind. Ever vigilant of the freight of meaning and symbolism that an image carries, Jose John Santos III has extended his visionary figuration beyond our shores, exhibiting his works at Pearl Lam Galleries in Singapore. (J.D.)