Eduardo Santiere: Crowds [Multitudes]
The firm hand sought out the minimal and a world appeared. Later, a hunger for color grew, until it covered everything. The episode between was the digging into paper’s bowels. This is Eduardo Santiere’s medium and matter: surface and volume. With graphite, colored pencils, sharp materials and infinite meticulousness, Santiere composes universes whose scale we cannot be sure of. He constructs a Scenario for an Empty World [Escenario para un mundo vacío] – one of his “scratchings” on exhibit – subjecting the paper’s surface to incisions and tearings that liberate it from the pressure that made it smooth and regular. He brings out sculptural reliefs that lightly dangle from the matter they have been detached from. It is a question of a morphological transformation that moves from the void to abundance.
The paper’s two-dimensionality is just as roughly subjugated in the works in which Santiere uses conventional drawing materials. Light graphite lines surround or connect points of color of various densities, colored ovoid forms – flat or on lacerated paper – are interconnected -- the paper erupts and spumes like foam. We lose ourselves in studying the position, shape, movement and mutual relation of the microorganisms or heavenly bodies hovering over the white of the page. We waver between surrendering to arbitrariness or hunting for a system.
In certain works, on the other hand, the systematic character makes itself quite visible: fitted to a checkered structure, the small units of volume and color are organized into Symphonies [Sinfonías]. But for all that, the grid does not impose uniformity: the points are forced into order but not into a compulsiveness of presence. Something similar happens with the Patterns. Something is missing declares the eloquent title of one of them: something is out of place. There’s something in the making of these works that replicates this transgression. If the name of the series calls to mind the imprint of a matrix used an infinite number of times to lighten the burden of the manual task, close inspection of this fabric of seemingly identical units will reveal that each element was drawn by hand, with all the grace and the error of the particular.
The patterns, to some extent, recall the postulates of pointillism. Georges Seurat gave his paintings a mechanical appearance, since the uniform points, without the stroke of an artistic individuality, could be replicated by anyone. As for Santiere, he conjures up, in order to disobey it, the idea of automated, matrix-like production. In this way he elicits a tension between manual procedure and series and also, between the particular and the collective that reappears in his latest works, the Crowds [Multitudes] series. Here the fabric of work gives way, and with it disappears the floating sensation of the points and color areas of his more minimalist output. On the other hand, the most totally mass effect forges on: the paper surface is now covered by the compact, dense matter of the colored pencils that produce abstract forms which, with little effort, we associate with living organisms. How do these crowds cluster and how do they behave? What link is there between each separate one and the crowd? How is the collective will organized? In any case, for Santiere the crowd does not seem to be either an indistinct or uniform mass. It is built up out of the sum of various elements, individualized in its smallest traits by its colors and textures. Settled into a detail-obsessed making that gives each part its own weight, the artist composes beautiful configurations that put one in mind of the forms of collective association, its spaces and fringes of action. For this reason I would venture to say that not “drawing” but “matter” is the key term for this series. Because, to be sure, the artist draws; yet in addition he strips the surface and forces volume to emerge, he prods it and makes the air appear. And above all, by the way in which he compacts the color, making it dense and corporeal, it is hard not to wonder what the total weight is of these crowds that populate the paper. Matter, after all, is also energy, a factor of transformation, and so strongly present as a substratum throughout Santiere’s work.
Verónica Tell
Dra. in the History and Theory of Art (UBA) and researcher at CONICET