Luis Antonio Santos’ As If It Was Swimming depicts close-ups of flowers, brought home by his mother from his grandmother’s funeral. These floral arrangements are photographed by Santos, rearranged and reframed. Through his process of rendering these images in watercolour, the images shift and dissolve, reforming through these translations, caught in between preservation and loss.
These images were made using watercolours, unconventionally combining mechanical and manual processes — a way of working that Santos has regularly employed and explored in his practice, often utilising technologies in surprising ways, and without eradicating the marks by his own hand. Here, the medium resists control: colours dissolve, details fragment, and surfaces distort, rendering the images unrecognisable from their original source. When one remembers moments, what often plays back is the recollection of the memory’s last moment of awareness, rather than of the actual event itself.
Excerpt written by Carina Santos.
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