Speaking about the exhibition “Hide”, mounted in 2014 at the Pearl Lam Gallery, from which this work comes, Leo A. C. Abaya noted that Santos’ “installations beg the viewer to breach the stillness of optical contemplation, replacing what is considered as the “linear, unblinking and fixed lone eye” of the classical tradition with bodily displacement, allowing “saccadic“ jumps (of the visual pyramid) from one focal point to another.”
In that show, he wrote, “the artist synthesizes previous and present tendencies. Self-reflexively, he uses cloth as an activator for (his) eye and body to interrogate mimesis or the imitation of the so-called real world. As an agent of depiction, he foregoes the scenographic position that privileged the arrangement of figures and objects in a matrix of unitary space. Like a camera zoom lens, he hones in on the subjects, optically and haptically scanning textures and surfaces, conjuring them as matrices upon which something may develop or emerge.
“Distinguished from mere drapery, cloth is not laid down in sensuous repose or undulated like a hilly landscape. It is depicted as an opaque externality. Like flayed skin or screen, it appears hung and upright, bearing its own weight against the force of gravity. In this way, it is confrontational like a wall or a barrier. It protects that which is inside. It is a border or edge that determines an entity from everything else.”
“As covering, cloth is also the material that physically wraps rubble, emphasized by the installation of the same in the exhibition. However, since the rock and concrete fragments that make up the rubble are not what they appear to be, being simulations, it makes one ponder. Having exceeded the copies of their reference, the unreliability that underneath the wrappings are either the simulations of objects as suggested or completely something else, begs the question: is a third layer of meaning intended? What does this shrouding of forms, this replacement of blunt significations do? What is the purpose of all these verisimilitude if depiction hides and covers? Is it the same as camouflage, which, through the mimicry of skin with proximal environment, an organism conceals itself without hiding? What is the artist trying to conceal?”
“In situating veridical paintings vis-à-vis wrapped and simulated objects within the same spatial field of experience, does the artist intend to make us feel a loss of certainty in what accounts for reality?”
- Leo A. C. Abaya, from the Hide Catalogue, produced by the Pearl Lam Gallery, Singapore.
Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Manila