Luis Antonio Santos plays with diametrically opposed concepts in Binary, an exhibition that borrows from linguistics and Saussurean structuralist theory. Entirely done in black-and-white—itself a paired opposite—Binary delves into the relationships between painting and print, painting and photography, finite and infinite.

This is territory that was explored to great extent by Andy Warhol, whose ‘mass-produced’ screenprints were scrutinized and debated throughout the 1960s with the boundary between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art as the conversational flashpoint. While the dust has settled and Pop Art has emerged the winner, the ideas introduced by its pioneers continue to be developed today.  

Binary’s conceit, though familiar, is quieter. Santos, via “paintings developed through photographic technology using the silkscreen process,” concerns himself with including and eliminating, marking and erasing. Through multiple abstracted images of chain-link fences and Persian rugs, here visits the idea of exterior and interior, inhabited and uninhabited space.

Chain-link fencing, a simple repeated pattern of diamonds, symbolizes a wealth of binaries: it separates what is mine from what is yours; it is a boundary that either cages something in or keeps something out. A chain-link fence condenses the idea of liberty and oppression into an interlocking weave of galvanized steel.

Santos’ ‘fence’ works—done on a large acrylic sheet, on canvas, and on Instax photographs—break up the monotonous symmetry of this mechanical barrier, introducing randomness by overlaying sections on top of each other. Dense areas of superimposed lines contrast with swaths of white space.

Structuralist theory suggests that we organize the world according to binary opposites. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was heavily influenced by Saussurean linguistics, went so far as to say that all human culture can be parsed and understood through contrasting ideas and that meaning is achieved only when a concept is pitted against another.

That is to say, Binary would be lacking if it were composed solely of works based on chain-link fencing. By introducing a second element—and only a second element, chosen judiciously—Santos completes his metaphor without muddying the waters: standing in opposition to the fence is the Persian rug.

Where the former is made of hard steel, the latter is made from the warp and weft of pliable thread. The Persian rug, like the chain-link fence, is based on patterns, albeit much more elaborate and stylized. Where the fence belongs outside, the carpet is found inside (used to either protect furniture or to decorate walls).

And as he did in his fence works, Santos destroys the geometric predictability found in these woven textiles. Included are silkscreened images of a Persian rug (using enamel repeated over an underpaint of chrome spray paint and acrylic paint) and a set of eight paper works arranged in a grid, which when viewed as a whole, looks like a glitched or databent images of a single carpet.

An aside: glitching, widely defined as “the aestheticization of digital or analog errors,” has served as the basis of several solo exhibitions by Santos. Seeing it here supporting another idea shows the evolution of the artist’s preoccupations and how this exhibition relates to his entire body of work thus far. In Binary, Santos manages once again to cover broad conceptual space through a finely thought-out metaphor—the symbolically rich opposition of chain-link fencing and Persian rugs—expressed in meaning-laden media.

‍