Sergio Castro San Martin
Vacant Surfaces
\"When there is so much to see, when an image is too full or when there are many images, you do not see anything anymore. (...) when an image is almost empty, when it is very poor, it can reveal so many things that viewer is completely satisfied when he sees that \"everything\" comes out of a vacuum\" (Wim Wenders, \"The Urban landscape\") My work comes out of reflections on suggested differences that separate the documentary genre from fiction. The possibility of giving a second life and look at certain characters and spaces, sums this search up well that translates into stories that have the idea of absence, emptiness and loneliness as a thread, where a sense of \"timelessness\" prevails through a chromatic bounded palette defined in each painting by formal visual neatness and minimalism, independent of the time and place where they were made. To all of thus is added what we could call a kind of \"frame awareness\". That is to stay, either within the frames - the limits of the image - that refers to what is out of field view reminding is that the story is happening in another place or by the division and isolated contours of each of the photographed elements we are left an impression that each subject, place or object is absorbed in space, portraying both notions of emptiness and fullness in figure and background. A limit marking the end of a surface or separating two entities; a contour delimiting a body or figure; a border limiting the outer part or one furthest from the center (of a thing). All these meanings are defined by division, delimitation or subdivision, but not by the core and inclusion. In the body of Castro San Martín´s work, everything happens exactly like this: objects, nature, humans, buildings and even the sky take on the same corporeal dimension and narrative weight. In the end we are all contoured that rub shoulders against each other and inhabit space. (Nathalie Goffard)
