In her latest solo exhibit, Where Are We? Isabel Santos paints her pandemic projections using post-war capitalist imagery in found advertisements from the ‘50s. These paintings were borne from a period of stillness, where everything planned and scheduled was either canceled or pushed back over and over again, as the Philippines continues to be the country under the longest lockdown in the world. For Santos, there was a dip in motivation and the looming questions of purpose were harder to escape: Will anyone see this? Why would anyone buy this?

Santos, spending so much of her time on and with these paintings, ultimately bred an attachment to them, leading to her not wanting to give them up or profess defeat.

Through Where Are We?, Santos confronts the existential question of the necessity of art and the effects of the pandemic on consumerist attitudes. Drawing parallels with a time where similar fatal risks and restrictions are now in place, Santos explores the usefulness of things, in relation to her own questions of value as an artist.

The images used here are altered – blurred, zoomed in, cropped – according to Santos’s tastes, with the eyes – the vehicle through which all sees and is seen – are erased. Following the vein of her previous work, all of the paintings in this show include women, something that is reflected in most of advertising today. The products advertised in the original images are not included in her compositions: the things these images were used for to sell are not even in the picture.

Rather than a craving for material rewards like in the post-war period, the boost in consumerism today is likely due to the simple fact that the middle-class population is at home, with purchasing power and very little to do. This period marks feelings of deprivation, of being trapped and unaroused.

Santos has long been attracted to the imagery and cultural contributions of this post-war period, and so working on the show became a vehicle of escapism, a way to forget the worries plaguing her, with this post-war triumph standing in as the eventual emergence from this dark time. Like the ‘50s advertisements used in these pieces, with their “look ahead” sensibilities and the appearance of possession of answers to all the modern problems, these paintings are transformed into hopeful totems of a solution for the problems we now face.

Advertisements are used to sell products, people or an experience. Santos worked off the idea that “advertisement is the cave art of the 20th Century,” and so it is a capsule of sorts, bright and flashing signs of the times. These images of mass production and a version of our lives pre-COVID where you could swim, travel on a plane, dress up, and drink are Santos’s own nostalgia for life as we knew it, a celebration of the freedom she now craves and longs for.

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