Silverlens Manila presents Eight Views From the Border, Carina Santos’ first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Born into a family of painters, Santos took the long road to the visual arts, taking productive if stubborn detours through graphic design, advertising, and journalism as a way to carve out her own place in the world. In those mediums, she distinguished herself with a quietly idiosyncratic style: a graphic designer likely to take a collage-like approach to a magazine layout, a visual communicator who preferred liminal spaces, a culture writer skeptical of easy answers. Ultimately, Santos followed those disparate paths to artmaking.

Eight Views From the Border is a kind of culmination of this journey. Featuring eight of her so-called “pour paintings”—evocative abstract paintings that employ material, gesture and chance to conjure up memories of terrains and skies—the exhibition sees the artist working with a new confidence, revealing a hard-won new language for painting that harnesses all the learnings from her past lives while taking the long view on her practice.

—Raymond Ang

Carina Santos’ (b. 1988, Manila) 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.