hide is an exhibition featuring a major body of new work by Filipino artist José Santos III, including 9 large-scale oil paintings rendered in photorealistic detail and 3 mixed-media installations. The subject matter of this body of work are objects that routinely go unnoticed because of their ordinariness. These are things that we know very well – indeed, that we know inside out. It is for this precise reason they have been selected: the works re-situate these items’ familiarity to us and their place in a visual vocabulary of images we subconsciously store. The dictionary definition format of the exhibition’s title, hide, plays on the varying and at times overlapping usages of the word “hide”: as a verb, describing the act of concealing something from open view, and as a noun, describing a skin that functions as a protective exterior surface. In both of these contexts, inside and outside exist not just alternately, but at times simultaneously, a duality that this exhibition aims to illustrate and expound on.