The Grass Withers and the Flowers Fade is Mona Santos’s exploration of finding solitude and stillness in the wreckage of best-laid plans that don’t go as one would hope. In this new body of work, Santos offers five square paintings, the largest two spanning four feet in both directions. They are the centrepieces, close-ups of floral arrangements, rendered in oil, typical fare for her work, and always a delight to see in person. Santos isolates the details and focuses on them, cropped and composed in a very deliberate way, encouraging quiet contemplation as the world of petals and shadows engulf.

These paintings are bookended by a series of photographs transferred on paper. Santos began her professional practice in 1990 with a group show, exhibiting solo for the first time in 1993, almost three years after she had her youngest daughter. Since then, she had wanted to try new things, and a workshop in New York presented an opportunity for exploration, both as an artist and as a mother whose three children have all grown up. She was meant to be learning how to arrange her own flowers, take photographs, and work with mediums that she only had a passing thought of trying. This was time meant to relearn who she was and to try new things that she had no space for as a mother. Because of worldwide cancelations, this didn’t go exactly as planned. Then came a long stretch of uncertainty and enforced isolation and stillness, which shot all her motivation to work, even on the things she knew how and loved to do.

Each of the 11 photo transfers – a series of 10 smaller ones, and a larger piece – feature floral arrangements and compositions done by Mona at home, sans workshop. She was aided by her husband in capturing the photographs the way she envisioned, and learned from her son how to actually do the process of transferring these photos, a different way of mark-making than she is used to. In this pieces are a zoomed out perspective, rather than close-up views of these flowers. And this process leaves behind a less than perfect picture, an impression of medium and pressure, directly applied by the artist herself.

Lastly, there is a graphite drawing: a simple still life diptych. It features an expanse of leaves in a vase, the same arrangement viewed from a different place. It is doubly mesmerizing, then, and reminds one of what can be seen and observed when one stays still and pays attention.

Taken from the first part of Isaiah 40:8, the title of the exhibition perhaps appears bleak. The world turns without a second thought spared for us: the grass withers and the flowers fade. However, there comes with this, a marker of solace: “but the word of God endures forever.” It is stability and permanence, in the face of a world that often feels on the brink of collapse. It certainly became a refuge for Santos, who through the course of making this body of work stuck at home in the middle of a pandemic, experienced stress and anxiety, as someone who always had a plan sorted out for the future. It’s not sadness, exactly, but a realization of the futility of plans in the face of something so much bigger than you. She thinks about everything she had planned for the year and decides that she’s not really sad about any of it. “It’s a realization,” she says. “It’s just that you really have no control.” This is the natural course of life, and although it didn’t add up to what she had envisioned for herself, working with what she was dealt with birthed something she didn’t quite expect but perhaps was on the way anyway.

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