Santos Family Debuts New Collaborative Exhibit at Silverlens Manila

To See A Landscape As It Is, the new exhibit from Silverlens Manila, puts together a collection of work from members of the Santos family, all of which work as artists today. The family exhibit includes the works of patriarch Soler Santos, his wife Mona Santos, and their three children Luis Antonio, Carina, and Isabel. 

Silverlens brings together the family ten years after their last joint exhibit, Gathered Narratives, in 2014. With a decade between the two, it brings to stark relief the way these artists have grown in their practice, both in style and substance.

“[It] provides a view of the five artists’ different trajectories, presented plainly and without the insistence of external context,” Carina Santos wrote in her exhibit write-up. “[This] presentation of new work outlines the ways in which these particular oscillations between mediums and genres provide markedly different expressions which are often expansions of their initial curiosities.”

Abstract Portraits and Flowery Dreams

Much of the Santos family worked on their own for their contributions for To See A Landscape As It Is, with the exception of some art pieces made together by Soler and Mona Santos. They eschewed collaboration to push instead a portrait of where each family member stands as an artist today. 

Soler Santos, for example, contributed 30 different paintings that utilize found materials to express an abstracted assembly of wood and paint. The works meld the mechanical metrics of construction with an attempted recreation of natural elements like leaves and branches. It’s a strange but compelling artificiality that works well together.

Mona Santos, meanwhile, paints some beautiful oil paintings of white flowers over a yellowing gray background. In comparison to the messiness of Soler’s work, Mona appears to be even-handed in her approach. It comes to the point where her paintings appear partitioned at times, something that Carina Santos notes is an intentional choice on their mother’s part. 

“Over the years, Mona has employed a discipline and restraint necessary to create work that does not need to be ostentatious to be seen. She means to draw attention to the beauty of her blooms, aiming to capture something that is so ephemeral and prone to quickly perish,” she wrote.

Soler & Mona Santos’s Collaborative Works

Their two collaborative works in To See A Landscape As It Is combine these aspects into a collage of flowers and trees that intercut together. It forms a broad forest of ephemera that interests together in a way that’s reminiscent of Richard McGuire’s Here. 

The work tells so much about the intersection of life and existence with how it plays with space and objects. It sprawls outwards, suggesting a bigger world of possibilities within the limited perspective of the canvas. 

Children In Their Own Pursuits

Each of the children of the Santos family crafts singular collections for To See A Landscape As It Is that could stand alone on their own shows. 

Isabel Santos, for example, mutates pop art symbolism and style into a reflection of the inner world. From striped panels that crash into each other like waves to distorted faces of beauty, she creates a manifestation of our own mental darkness. 

Luis Antonio Santos’ works utilizes screenprints and cut-up portions of paintings on linen to craft a chaotic fragmentation of our environment. He also created a work on plexiglass of a house in either mid-construction or mid-demolition.

“These linen pieces are a combination of several techniques,” Carina Santos wrote. “… [The] gestural hand is present in the brushwork of the underpainting and the crudeness and immediacy of the way these components have been cut and put back together, both of which contrast with the order and close-to-perfect replication of printing.”

Melting Into Each Other

Finally, Carina Santos paints some interesting abstract forms that at times appear to melt into each other. Other paintings of hers in the exhibit melt into a pool of colors that mesh together into a contained portion in the center of the canvas.  

“Experimentations began as washes of watercolor on paper, relying on gesture, gravity and material to dictate where the colors travel and intermingle. In this exhibition, these watercolor paintings are isolated geological forms, created by the terrain of the material, and the starting points of the oil paintings,” she wrote.

Engaging in Different Directions

With the different directions that the exhibit careens toward to follow each artist’s interests, the exhibit still hangs together surprisingly well. Common themes and design ideas appear to flow through many of the Santos family’s works.

For example, fragmentation of images appears to be a common theme in most of the paintings. So, too, is the playful execution of the melding of colors into an abstract whole. The works are very much individual, but these common threads keep the exhibit from being just a review of where each family member’s work is today. 

“Perhaps it is inevitable, to have their work embody certain similarities, as it is inevitable to adopt a particular sameness, having grown up alongside and around one another. Still, the family’s individual bodies of work are so markedly different from one another that one would be hard pressed to mistake one for another,” Santos wrote in their 

To See A Landscape As It Is gives audiences a thorough summary of the artistic explorations of the Santos family. It showcases the unique aspects of their works, and the unifying portions as well. Though a lot to handle, it ultimately rewards audiences with something of a full view of their artistic practices, and how it all connects together. 

Photos by Elle Yap.

Related reading: Cabangis Family Joins Forces for Collaborative Exhibit in Modeka Art

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