Located at the interstices of reality, halfway between what is absent and what is present, the artwork by Santos Montes (Santander, 1949) has tended to explore the most latent facets of existence by projecting an intimate perspective, full of symbolism, on the landscape and the people that inhabit it. Aspiring to reveal a less apparent dimension, Montes starts from reality to then transcend it through a poetic photography that seeks to penetrate the shell of the sensitive world to delve deeper into the most concealed features of what surrounds us.
This exercise of palimpsestic reading of reality has inspired his latest project which is conceived as a journey along the Nacional-II, a disused road that symbolizes the inertia of the past in times dominated by dynamism, change and mutability. By focusing on those businesses, homes and objects that have been overshadowed by progress, Santos Montes redirects our gaze towards what is transitory, between the being and the non-being.
By going beyond the nostalgia for a bygone past, his photographs explore the creative potential of what has lost its original purpose. He updates the idea of ready-made to highlight the potentialities of reality through the multiplication of its possible readings and interpretations. On this point, through his photographs he creates an imaginary museum in the style described by André Malraux. Through photographic framing, Montes museumizes – endows with value and recontextualizes – the landscape and everything that comprises it, thus revealing the artistic aspect of something that is not necessarily considered to be art.
In this way, uninhabited houses, closed businesses and deserted roads become non-places which, devoid of their conventional meaning, open up to new interpretations. Whether understood – from a rather romantic point of view – as symbols of the passage of time, of impermanence and, ultimately, of the triumph of nature over civilization, or, from a more socio-economic perspective, as collateral damage from a changing economy which determines the landscape, the vestiges that Santos Montes presents pose questions that are as universal as they are current, about the imprint humanity makes upon the landscape, the mutability of our environment and the transience of it all.
Institut d'Estudis Ilerdencs
Join our
