Santiago Porter

Santiago Porter has diligently worked through photography and painting to explore the deep and sensitive relationship between the appearance of things and their history. Through his images, the remnants (both personal and private, public and collective) reveal that nothing and no one completely disappears, nothing and no one can become entirely absent. Through his research turned into silent observation, Porter captures the imprint of existence that remains forever embedded in materialities; he reflects on condensed memory, time, and the history of communities. Both individual stories and social intricacies.
Porter applies a perspective in his work that traverses the edges and margins, looking beyond the obvious common ground where one's gaze might linger. His photographs present to us what things evoke, they reveal their essence, not content with their literal appearance because the interesting aspect does not reside there, but rather in the hidden, silenced aspect of their existence. A sort of X-ray of the invisible. The poetic density of his work aligns with the technical and artistic resources he employs to capture these dense, uninhabited, stripped, gray, and overwhelmingly lonely atmospheres that conceal behind their veil the DNA of their existence.