In 2014, the Santos family — husband and wife, Soler and Mona, and their three children, Luis Antonio, Carina, and Isabel — showed their work collectively at Silverlens, in their previous site, along the same road. At this point, Soler and Mona had been working on their practice for decades, while their children were newly exploring their own expressions, coming from studies and professions decidedly removed from the fine art background they grew up around.

In Gathered Narratives, both Soler and Mona created large scale paintings drawing from nature, with Soler refiguring flora and detritus into geometric abstractions and Mona recreating the same chiaroscuro effect of her carefully painted flowers in the still life of a bed and rest. Luis Antonio’s photorealistic oil paintings of skulls were at the forefront of his artistic practice at this time, but the inclusion of galvanized iron sheets (painted in perfect precision) and photographic impressions on non-traditional materials are early indications of where his interests are currently and have continued to move towards. Carina’s work had not traversed her chosen media then, where she had been only working with found materials, mixed media, and personal ephemera to reference references. The youngest, Isabel, began developing her visual language, populating this personal alphabet with distinct imagery and text that she still employs in her work today.

Ten years later, the Santoses are returning to Silverlens for their only group exhibit since then, occupying the entirety of Silverlens’ new site, with new work that ecompasses all their current practices, a catalog of their individual progressions in the last decade. To See A Landscape As It Is — a phrase taken from Roni Horn’s “Thicket No. 1” — provides a view of the five artists’ different trajectories, presented plainly and without the insistence of external context. With 2014’s Gathered Narratives as the last save point, this presentation of new work outlines the ways in which these particular oscillations between mediums and genres provide markedly different expressions which are often expansions of their initial curiosities.

From his first solo show in 1981 at 21, Soler has paid particular attention to what is oft-overlooked. Although nature has been a prevailing subject in art across periods and genres, Soler is drawn to the texture and stillness, rather than capturing anything idyllic or picturesque. Fallen leaves, geological formations, decomposition of natural material: these have accompanied him across over four decades of art-making.

Here, Soler has created 30 assemblages, swathed in red, adorned with found materials he has foraged and collected over time. Soler’s process is one that is of constant production — not in a way to produce, but almost as a compulsion, a necessity. He works on multiple pieces simultaneously, with his eye and feeling the ultimate deciders of when a particular piece is finished. Each assemblage measures 12 by 12 inches, easy to arrange in a grid, a tool often utilised by Soler to give structure to his sprawl.

As if in opposition to the need for containment of a cacophony, Mona’s oil paintings are of close-ups of floral arrangements, segmented into grids and put back together, as though one was looking at these petals through a window. Throughout her career, Mona has employed a gentle and careful hand, with shadows and light so delicately shaded, the gradations look like evaporating smoke and vapor. Over the years, Mona has employed a discipline and restraint necessary to create work that does not need to be ostentatious to be seen. She means to draw attention to the beauty of her blooms, aiming to capture something that is so ephemeral and prone to quickly perish.

Both Soler and Mona favor to operate with the notion of form as expression, of form as subject matter itself. Their two collaborations for To See a Landscape see them knitting together form, subject matter and technique in tapestries both cautious and wild. Combining a myriad of techniques they have explored throughout their artistic lives, these collaborations are a mixture of painting and photo transfers, gridded and sprawling, a marriage of elements that shouldn’t work together but do.

Luis Antonio began his career as a painter and has continued to explore the ways in which painting relates to other processes. Similar to his “Fragmentation” series, where he methodically prints sections of photographs in layers, laying each segment like brickwork and then rearranging them. In these linen works, Luis Antonio screenprints recurring elements in his practice, creating pictures both familiar and not, facilitating the idea of repetition and its ties to memory recall.

These linen pieces are a combination of several techniques whereby the gestural hand is present in the brushwork of the underpainting and the crudeness and immediacy of the way these components have been cut and put back together, both of which contrast with the order and close-to-perfect replication of printing. 

At the far end of the room, he continues with another piece from his post-site series, where the UV ink is printed on plexiglass. The image is of a house in a state of either construction or demolition. Like the house depicted in the image, a liminal space is created within the structure itself, where one views this work as though seeing through an image, or rather, altering an image based on what is visible beyond it and what this allows.

Largely inspired by color field paintings of the abstract expressionists, Carina’s paintings have evolved from amorphous, alien landscapes into shapeless pools of color that collide and collapse into one another. Experimentations began as washes of watercolor on paper, relying on gesture, gravity and material to dictate where the colors travel and intermingle. In this exhibition, these watercolor paintings are isolated geological forms, created by the terrain of the material, and the starting points of the oil paintings.

A tablescape is situated in the room, displaying other forms these landscapes have taken: sculpture, textile, and printed matter. Carina, a multi-disciplinary artist, is of the belief that each aspect of one’s life informs the rest and one another. In showing the different elements and forms her work has taken shape, there is the hope that one is able to read across these objects and comprehend their varied relationships.

Similarly, Isabel’s work is heavily influenced by her own life. Her process is divided into two modes, where one is more methodical and deliberate, and the other, guided by life’s interiorities and intimate, visceral feeling. The first mode is largely based on her visual taste and language, communicating in pictograms. Rendered in large scale paintings, these images are stand-ins for narratives she composes while doing visual research.

The second mode began as scribblings to replicate natural geoforms of Taiwan’s otherworldly, alien terrain in Yehliu, but has recently expanded into spatial expressions. After painting several murals, where the scale of her work has grown exponentially, she has wanted to replicate the feelings she has wished to escape from while making these ink drawings. Here, in a small room, she brings to the fore the sensation of being enveloped and suffocated by her own mental health struggles.

The five artists’ work move in different directions, engaging with one another, at times in less visible ways, as most communication between families goes, yet creating a singular language that eludes complete comprehension. Perhaps it is inevitable, to have their work embody certain similarities, as it is inevitable to adopt a particular sameness, having grown up alongside and around one another. Still, the family’s individual bodies of work are so markedly different from one another that one would be hard pressed to mistake one for another.

Horn has recapitulated her regular visits to Iceland — a place where everything and everywhere continue to shift and move: “Iceland is always becoming what it will be, and what it will be is not a fixed thing either.” The same is true for the ambiguous territories each of these artists occupy.  Each artist’s work, no matter how abstract, commonplace, or seemingly unremarkable in their chosen subject matter, is deeply personal to its maker. Derived from decades of developing an art practice, traversing time and place, the result of this presentation is a survey of where each individual person is at in their current working life.

These five artists all work separately, each involved in their lives beyond the one they share together. Coalesce.

– Carina Santos

Soler San Pedro Santos (b. 1960), who signs his work as “Soler,” held his first one-man show in 1981 at the Luz Gallery when he was 21 years old. He has had over 40 solo exhibitions since. Soler actively joins group exhibitions in galleries, as well as institutions like the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Vargas Museum, Museo Iloilo, and Ayala Museum. Soler has been known to paint subjects culled from nature, but his interest seems to lay in observations of different environments in general.

In over three decades of his career in art, Soler has represented the Philippines abroad—at the Young Art in Asia (Hong Kong Art Centre, Hong Kong, 1980), 25 Young Artists (Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, 1983), 2nd Asian Show (Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan, 1985), Seoul Contemporary Art Show (The National Museum of Art, Korea, 1986), 14th Asian Show (Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan, 1999), 11th International Biennal Print and Drawing Exhibition (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2004). He is also the recipient of several art awards including First Prize at the ASEAN Painting Competition in 1983 and the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1992. He was also a Finalist for the Philippine Art Awards in 1994, 1997, 2001, 2003, and 2005. Soler studied at the College of Fine Arts in the University of the Philippines from 1978 to 1981. He founded West Gallery with his artist wife, Mona Santos, in 1989.

Mona Santos (b. 1962, Manila) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, and photography. She studied at the University of the Philippines from 1978 to 1982, where she developed a foundational approach to her art. In 1989, she co-founded West Gallery alongside her husband, Soler Santos, creating a platform that has been instrumental in supporting contemporary art in the region. Her works have been featured in numerous exhibitions across the Philippines and internationally, including Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and New York, highlighting her enduring influence and artistic reach in the global art scene.

Luis Antonio Santos (b. 1985) lives and works in Quezon City as a visual artist working primarily with painting and photography. His practice revolves around the tension between contradictions and engages with themes relating to identity using time, space, and memory as points of departure. Oil painting, screenprinting, and digitally manipulated photography as aesthetic strategies are often employed along with the use of everyday utilitarian materials as subject matter to examine these ideas. He has been exhibiting since 2010 with solo shows at Singapore (Fost Gallery) and Manila (Silverlens Gallery, West Gallery, Blanc Gallery, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Artinformal and the Drawing Room.) He has also been included in several group exhibitions in Manila, New York (Jane Lombard Gallery), Beijing (Tang Contemporary), Singapore, Hong Kong (Art Central), Athens (Athens Video Art Festival) and Malaysia. He won the Fernando Zobel Prize and the Embassy of Italy Purchase Prize for the Ateneo Art Awards 2023. He was also included as a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2023. He has also been shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards twice (2014, 2015) and has been nominated for the Signature Art Prize, Singapore Art Museum (2018).

Carina Santos’ (b. 1988) practice moves within the intersections between arts, letters, and design. She completed her Masters in Theory and Philosophy at the Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Since moving to the UK, Santos has been venturing into a more diverse approach, introducing new media (websites, video, sound) into the overall body of work, with a particular interest in collaboration and communication via the Internet. Santos’ works often present narratives informed by the spaces and landscapes we inhabit and exist. She lives and works between Manila and London.

Isabel Santos (b. 1990, Quezon City) is an artist and illustrator based in Manila, Philippines. She graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2012. She had three residencies in 2016: League Residency at Vyt, New York, CA, MAC in Marnay Sur Seine, France, and Galerie 102 in Berlin. In 2020, she won the Uniqlo UT Grand Prix, a prize in collaboration with MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art). She has shown in the Philippines, New York, France, and Berlin.