Artist: Ana Santos
Exhibition title: Stanza
Venue: The Goma, Madrid, Spain
Date: September 10 – November 1, 2015
Photography: Roberto Ruiz Arguedas, images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Goma, Madrid
For her second solo show at The Goma, the Portuguese artist Ana Santos recreates a universe in which the boundaries between drawing, object and painting vanish.
Santos is drawn to the process of exogenous transformation which objects that have fallen into disuse are doomed to. Once found, they enter into the artist’s inventory of material to be manipulated, freeing the abandoned object from its present uselessness and creating sculptures that encourage us to dwell on the precariousness, fragility or colouring of the composition. Although her works ought to be contemplated without dwelling on the categorisation of the objects (if they can be recognised as such), it is worth noting that the artist’s practice does not engender any kind of transfiguration: the parts maintain their intrinsic properties even though the functionality of the recognisable object has been extirpated, thus incapacitating the thing from its previous use function (over and above its new artistic condition). What Santos affords us is a plastic experience predicated on a minimal gesture: a poetic exercise that decodes little-frequented realities.
Ana Santos, Untitled, 2015
Ana Santos, Untitled, 2015
Ana Santos, Untitled, 2015
Ana Santos, Untitled, 2015
Ana Santos, Untitled, 2015
