La Casona de Murias de Paredes hosts the new exhibition of the artist Esther Santás "American Style", thanks to the support of the Instituto Leonés de Cultura.
The director of the Art Department of the Instituto Leonés de Cultura (ILC), Luis García Martínez, writes about "American Style", the exhibition presented by the Leonese photographer Esther Santás.
About this exhibition, which will remain open throughout the summer, the author says: "The exhibition could have an endless number of common images that (especially through film) show us a way of life that in years gone by was very different from ours, and whose luminosity and colour have always fascinated me. I intend to transform the Exhibition Hall into a large garage, but at the same time I will try to sprinkle it with some photographs of people or buildings that break the visual routine. All the photos have been taken in America.
By LUIS GARCÍA MARTÍNEZ
Esther Santás has a long career in the field of documentary photography in the most classical sense of the term, but always from a creative approach and sense, an aspect that makes her photographic projects intentionally become an essentially artistic production, which is characterised by a careful and exquisite formal treatment from the technical aspect and also by an intense conceptual approach.
Her work stands out in this type of documentary proposals, which are more specific, her works centred on the Sierra Pambley Foundation, the series dedicated to Japanese urbanism and its alternative culture and several centred on nature, among others. Esther has a special way of observing and capturing the surrounding reality, a sensitivity that goes far beyond, her experience and experimentation of the photographic fact arises from that permanent real journey that she habitually makes and that is the substantial and germinating axis of her work, but also and at the same time it is an imaginary, mental, constructive and transforming journey. Thus, starting from one of the basic traditions of classical photography, such as travel photography, Esther provides us with a set of works that make us look at and observe the reality apprehended and captured from a new approach and renewed perspective, sometimes presenting us with very real works, but on other occasions, she offers us proposals that take us to imaginary and unreal worlds.
The photographic project is the fundamental axis that generates, structures and gives meaning to the set of images that, after a complex elaboration work, Esther Santás uses and formalises to reach the final point, which is undoubtedly the challenge of the public presentation of a photographic exhibition. After a hard and intense work of capturing, selecting and manipulating the images by computer, Esther brings us her own reality, her own particular vision, a new concept of that capture taken anywhere in the world, an action arising from a special and maximum tension that awakens an unusual interest in her for that image, which will serve as a base matrix for its later elaboration and treatment. It is a slow, complex process, of tremendous solitude in following each of the phases through which the final configuration of the work takes place until its transfer to the definitive support. For this reason, his works serve as an element of analysis and reflection in relation to the way of capturing and understanding the reality that surrounds us.
