Bottle-imps, squirming and twitching

Memories are Protean in nature. They are slippery things that shift and warp, crystallize for a split second of clarity, then dissolve into half-truths and vague facsimiles of reality. Then It Happened, Luis Santos’s third solo exhibition, captures the caprice of remembrance in a series of monochrome portraits possessing the visual signature of long-exposure photographs.

“The show is about memories,” says Santos, “how we perceive http://sildenafilcitrate-100mg-rx.com/ and recollect them, its fickle and abstract nature, and how it’s constantly changing depending on what and how we feel; how we choose to remember and forget, and how this influences us.”

Santos is a technically skilled artist whose hyper-realistic canvases caress every detail, with the exception of the most important one. While each sildenafil citrate 20 mg crease and fold of a subject’s clothing is rendered with precision, the face of the subject himself (or herself) is deliberately blurred and obscured. Santos’s portraits defy stillness: they revel in movement and present several perspectives in one locale.

Smeared they may be, the faces reveal enough of themselves to allow recognition.

The distortion is not gimmickry. It is a legitimate inquiry into the metaphysical: Can we truly know pulmonary htn sildenafil the “self”—whether our own “selves” or other “selves”—the “self” that French semiotician Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida described as “light, divided, dispersed” and compared to a “bottle-imp” that cannot hold still, giggling instead in its jar.

In Then It Happened, Santos serves up Barthes’s bottle-imp, squirming and twitching on the canvas. His depictions hew so close to real life that another observation in Camera Lucida, made from the point of view of the subject, becomes germane to this exhibition: “The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. cialiscoupon-freetrialrx In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.”—ll

Luis Antonio Santos “Then sildenafilcitrate-100mg-rx.com It Happened” opens on Saturday 6PM January 05, 2012 at Blanc Peninsula Manila. For Further inquiries, please call/sms +63920-9276436 like “blanc gallery” on facebook or email info@blanc.ph.

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