Art Office

At a time when success and success and certainty are so promoted that people move in a corresponding one-way street, there is little appreciation for doubt or stepping back. Nevertheless, it is important, wrote Victor Santamarina in his R&D plan, and art can represent that. He quoted philosopher Agamben as stating that every act of creation can also be a choice not to perform something, a stage between being and not being. It was on this thought that Santamarina grafted the intention to translate the possibility-of-not-being into sculptural casting techniques, reversing processes. In this way he wanted to show moments or forms that are still unfinished and that are open to all possibilities: suspending the act of becoming, as an act of resistance. With such solidified expressions of hesitation, of ambiguity, he wanted to respond to the societal constraint that we must always act assertively, in “a state of emergency of overdetermination: certainty, precision, achievement, execution. I want to develop strategies that contradict capital discipline and recognize life-affirming potential in the creative act.”

Sculptor Santamarina experiments with installations that include the making process and intermediate stages. He presents these at galleries and art spaces, in Madrid and in Rotterdam, and site-specific such as at Buitenplaats Brienenoord outside and at A Tale of a Tub, where he showed the R&D research 'lobe squatting' in 2019. It was a sculptural solidification of thoughts and dreams, and it referred to the lobe style of 17th-century silversmithing. The R&D committee also gladly honored this new plan with a valued non-technical approach and conceptual working method of an artist who creates exciting subtle work.

The study was to be conducted over a period of five months. Santamarina started by mixing cast metal with precarious materials such as wax, clay, plaster or steel and wood scraps. He allowed the forms and volumes that were created to be determined by the formative stages of the process. Elements can be recognized in it, such as the moulds, tools or work tables. Partly he did this partly in Rotterdam, partly during an experimental residency at the Fonderia Battaglia in Milan, a very old bronze foundry that does not participate in the competition and efficiency of modern technologies - a reason that this company appealed to him. He would share the result of this research in a public event in his studio or in an exhibition space in Rotterdam.