Luis Antonio Santos - As If It Was Swimming

Luis Antonio Santos
As If It Was Swimming

The Drawing Room
exhibition notes
2025

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.

The final images are reminiscent of the desktop inkjet printers of the early 90s, where the lo-fi aesthetics replicate an image that vaguely resembles what it was meant to recreate. Details are fuzzy, misalignments and distortions bloom, and the picture never quite turns out perfect. What remains is an altered version, an echo than a replica, a memory rather than a record.

As If It Was Swimming is named after a line in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi film, Solaris, which explores the unreliability of reality and, thematically, fallible reconstructions from memory, which are often dissolved, corrupted, limited, and transformed by personal biases. The paintings are copies of an image, not quite faithful to the flowers themselves, but still representing some semblance of truth, touched by the mechanisms and steps that led to their completion.

In this space of transformation, the works exist in flux. The boundaries between representation and abstraction blur, mirroring the impermanence of recollection — images that dissolve, dematerialise, and rematerialise, never fully fixed in place.

Here is always somewhere else.