An Echo Made Tangible / (sun in an empty room) is centered on memories: their nature, the way we retrieve them, their function and eventual collapse, and the subsequent implications of this loss. Memories hold a fragility, which is tied to the precarious state of our sense of self. We are shaped by what we remember, and our identities are often directly impacted by what we hold onto and what we repress.

There are three modes of work that Luis Antonio Santos has made for “Fragmentation,” a series of pieces included in this show, which consider these notions, particularly that of the erosion of memory, whether this happens through trauma, disease or a natural decline due to old age. Santos’ paternal grandfather was afflicted with a degenerative disease that completely obliterated his memory over time. The disease is thought to possibly be genetic, though studies for its main causes remain inconclusive. It altered his physical state quite quickly, too, and he started to forget what words meant (he was a voracious reader) and how to take care of himself.

Santos’ source photographs  are divided into grids, which are broken into smaller silkscreen tiles. The initial layer of each piece is an abstracted layer of acrylic paint, which is what illuminates the image and what later on reveals it as a picture. These underlying gestures dictate what is visible to the spectator, just as light reveals the image that a photograph is trying to make. Before Santos lays down the prints of each picture, the visibility is already being dictated by the paint laid down before it. 

The resulting pictures in Santos’ work in this collection are quite dense, the layers making the picture appear almost like an abstraction or a vibration, though with a sense of familiarity about them. You recognise what a photograph is trying to portray, but you can’t quite make out the details. To him, this entire process is like laying bricks, each fragile and delicate layer informs the entire entity and builds towards it. The process Santos has employed also recalls the compounding nature of bricklaying: to be able to complete the image, the completion of the first layer — each tile printed against and beside another tile. The progression of the image is reliant on what had been laid down before. There is a process and a sequence.

Santos, here, looks at memory-recording, “like how sound is recorded into vinyl,” a process that is “wound-like,” where memories are akin to wounds, scars, and trauma. This arduous process bears witness to the signs of labour that went into the work. Each error, misprint, misalignment, or abrasion, even the integrity of the paint and the silk mesh, is a trace of the hands that were involved in making these images.

In contrast to the swathes of shadows, another series of images, printed on plexiglass, occupy the room, along with a  similar piece of work standing alone in the smaller extension of the space, usually reserved for an accompanying exhibition by another artist. The images here were printed with white UV ink. Taken with the aide of flash photography at night, the only impressions we see on the glass are what the flash illuminates. Santos captures light in this manner — finding a way to hold it captive in an image — similar to film negatives. But this “light” exists as developed images, too, in how the ending output and function of the work reacts to the space and the visitors of the gallery.

Elsewhere, Santos superimposes stark imagery on images of foliage. Broken white fences and a sampaguita pattern (the imagery taken from glass windows in his family home) bloom around reconstructed tropical jungles, perhaps as ways to conceal trauma and overwrite what is with what could be instead. Like the pictures in “Fragmentation,” the ones in this series are never quite right, never quite completely what you expect them to be. The hold we have on memory is tenuous and we rarely, if ever, paint the same picture twice, purely off it. There will often be a little glitch or variance, a way of remembering something, a certain way, and if we tell ourselves one version often enough, that is what becomes true to us.