OSCAR SANTILLAN: Work at "Kierkegaard's Walk" show, at Marilia Razuk gallery (Sao Paulo, Brazil)

Silver Wake
(Estela Plateada)
Watch
2010

Detail of the face of the watch

Oscar Santillan

artist STATEMENT

A few years ago I renounced my political beliefs. By getting rid of the ideological superstitions and fraudulent morals of social utopias, I awoke to phenomenological thinking. In fact, I am not a citizen anymore; I am a wanderer who sneaks into the gaps of perception, history, and culture itself.

If there is something I am willing to create, it will be a device able to fill the gap in between clocks and calendars. If there is a rebellion I am willing to join, it is the one where the crowd whispers their demands. If there is a problem I am trying to solve, it is how to turn history into an empty skin with no past.

Manipulating materials through a meticulous process is at the core of my practice. This becomes evident in Memorial, where I extract the ink from the New York Times and transform it into a miniature deer. Or, in The Permanent Blink where I stitch together every blink by James Dean from all of his films to create a single video. Stripping the material’s embedded history is necessary to fit it into an unexpected body so that it can become a new flesh.

Therefore, my work is not about silence or erasure, but about mutation: how to transform marble into air, and air into flesh. It is about carefully creating a phantom while offering it a new body to inhabit.

I aim for a way to cast mood instead of building up meaning. Mood must suspend interpretation by inflaming the spectator’s sensibility.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Work at "Kierkegaard's Walk" show, at Marilia Razuk gallery (Sao Paulo, Brazil)

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