In Only What I Want to See, Isabel Santos uses the practice of rearrangement and reconfiguration as ways to make sense of things, manipulating existing material in an attempt to mold them into pictures and images that resonate more with her. Culled from collected reproductions of comics she acquired during her residencies in New York and Marnay sur Seine, including French erotic comics and ones from more mainstream publishers, the images Santos uses are cut up and rearranged, suiting her own version of reality and, as the name of the show suggests, selecting only the parts that she wants to see.
Santos frames what she sees through her own perspective, creating worlds that are at once recognizable and unfamiliar. An array of styled hair arranged in a neat grid is a little alien, but ultimately still translate as hair. The women’s faces divorced from their hair still translate as women’s faces, without much prompting.
Her recent focus, too, on women is partly motivated by sentimentality — in a way, Santos’s own version of her grandfather’s trademark “Malang’s women” — but it’s also a rooted interest in the female body and what these bodies signify in the media, politics, and culture. Santos relies on renditions of women in comics as a way of drawing anatomy, curious about and attracted to the way curves and fingers look, as well as what these female bodies imply.
In Only What I Want to See, there is an emphasis on a taking away of the inessential, a separation of parts to bring focus to what Santos wants to see. The result is her attempt at communicating her own version of what she takes in. For Santos, art is always an extension of her person, even if the result is not always obvious or cloyingly sentimental. Through these collected images, her playful rearrangements become ways of communicating what she wants to say, a way of delivering her vision to others.