Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 — Carina R. Santos

Soler Santos & Luis Antonio Santos
Art Basel Hong Kong 2025

The Drawing Room
exhibition notes
2025

Staged in dialogue, Soler’s Amalgam series and Luis Antonio’s Untitled (Structures) series and Fragmentation series naturally visually communicate with each other, though each one is a result of a natural progression of each artist’s practice.

Soler, an artist whose career began in 1981, has constantly evolved with his explorations of a singular subject: nature, in all the ways that it applies to what exists outside and around us. From depicting fallen foliage to the natural textures and complexities of the environment in hyperrealist, painterly modes, his practice has evolved to include the abstraction and distillation of these concepts, recombined together in the form of assemblages, photography, and sculpture. For Amalgam, Soler selects the sources of his inspiration from nature and his own environment — the frenetic city that he lives in — and uses them as the foundation of each work. From there, he builds: whether by the addition of more objects, debris, or paint.

For over four decades, Soler has explored the relationship between painting, photography, and mixed media through the central theme of nature. This recent collection of work is built upon an archive of natural elements that he has collected over the last ten years, which serve as both the inspiration and subject matter of his practice. Over this long period of time, an ever-evolving dialogue is constantly being created between mediums and processes, time and space, and nature itself.

Historically, painting and photography have been in conversation, often influencing one another, especially with the inclusion of different techniques, processes, and technologies involved in the creation of work within each genre. Where the precision and accuracy allowed by photography in capturing an image or moment and the space in which painting allows for interpretation and emotional expression meet is where Soler’s interest lies. It is in this interplay of both mediums that Santos chooses to work, going beyond utilising photographs as reference for paintings and including these images as part of the reimagination that painting begins.

The collected objects serve as the subjects for both mediums, where the constant documentation of his surroundings — whether capturing the images on camera or collecting the detritus and embedding in his work — adds layers and dimension to his canvas. The decade-long process also imbues this collection of work with the essence of his subject matter, exploring themes of change, observation, and the patience involved in witnessing the passage of time. Nature is static; it grows, decays, and transforms.

Luis Antonio, who started as a hyperrealist painter as well, began exploring his own process for this body of work through the work, “A View of the Dawn in the Tropics” (2018), echoing it later again in 2022 for his show at MO_Space, An Echo Made Tangible / (sun in an empty room). This process begins similarly to how one would begin a painting: dividing an image into grids, and laying down a foundation that will affect later on what part of the image is made visible. Luis Antonio has likened this process to laying bricks. This arduous process bears witness to the signs of labour that went into the work. Each error, misprint, misalignment, or abrasion, even the integrity of the paint and the silk mesh, is a trace of the hands that were involved in making these images.

In Untitled (Structures), Luis Antonio utilises a material that he has been working with since 2013. Galvanised iron sheets are a ubiquitous utility in his hometown, representing several modes of demarcation both physical and psychological. Used in obscuring construction sites, the GI sheets are a physical barrier between the spaces, but also stand in as a separation between the public and the private. In this series, Luis Antonio distorts these sheets, stretching and twisting their forms, then further translates them across different mediums — mounted as sculptural objects rather than a constructed space, painted as mirrored images, printed in unpredictable layers. Each version plays with how these materials carry memory: the way a surface holds onto its past, how it decays, transforms, or disappears altogether.

Elsewhere, in his Fragmentation series, Luis Antonio superimposes the stark imagery of broken fences on subtle impressions of foliage printed in acrylic on retroreflective fabric. Similar to another series of his, where these images are printed in white UV ink on plexiglass, the full weight of these images are made visible really only through light. The fences are isolated, call to our attention, yet when light shines on the work, the reflection of the tropical jungles and overgrowth push through into view.

At its core, this series is about borders — real and imagined, political and personal — and the prescribed lines we draw across maps to form cities and spaces, the divisions we enforce, and the traces left behind as things shift and erode. Galvanised iron is practical, raw, and disposable, yet it shapes our landscapes in ways we barely notice. These works bring it to the fore, make the invisible visible, and use it as a language for exploring space, time, and the weight of impermanence.

Soler’s and Luis Antonio’ works interrogate similar themes, and echo similar aspects of different modes of making, though approaching each differently, either through combination or isolation, drawing largely from their own sensible and perceptible experience.

Here is always somewhere else.