Selecting a series of imagery that engages with both local and international landscapes, Soler Santos creates a new series of work expanding both his practices in painting and photography. Gleaning from both local and foreign spaces that he inhabits, he prolongs the fleeting moment by capturing them.

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Santos has developed a lifelong practice of photographic documentation, where nothing of his own interest escapes his attention, particularly of objects and environments in the middle of natural decay and transformation. These photographs serve as a database and a reservoir of his visual inquiry, filed and collected. This process of collecting images is personal and intimate, reflecting Santos’ continued interest in the aesthetics of impermanence, and preserving the layered histories embedded in the landscape.

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Central to his body of work is the examination of transitory states, closely investigating sites where organic and constructed environments deteriorate, erode, and evolve, often in cyclical ways. These points of decay are also generative processes that unearth new forms of beauty, texture, and narrative, where moments of both rot and rebirth are put towards the forefront and given centre stage.

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The main gallery contains paintings that play with scale and detail and that combine Santos’ different approaches to the medium throughout his career. Photorealistic detail of detritus intermingle with abstractions of ghostly suggestions of nature and flat colour captures of a forest scene.

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Inside the smaller gallery are installations of photographs taken in four sites: Quezon City, Cuenca, El Nido, and Australia. Collaged images on birchwood resist segregating these photographs into their respective geographies, creating a nebulous narrative of the moment at which Santos was in those places.

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Santos brings to the fore the ephemerality of nature – both the environment and us who inhabit these spaces – and with these images, raises questions about temporality, ecological vulnerability, and the relationship between humanity and its surroundings. The photographs he captures serve as the starting point of these expressions, which blur the boundary between mere observation and artistic interpretation.

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In On decay, the viewers are invited to sit with their perceptions of decay, and reconsider the thought of it as an endpoint, and reframe it, instead, as a site of meaning, memory, and aesthetic possibility.

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-Carina Santos

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