Eder Santos is a painter of light. Since the 1980s he has used the cool, detached technology of video, and in the hot climate of Minas Gerais has warmed up electronic images gathered from his daily life. Not interested in the mimetic—a significant aspect of his chosen medium—he probes the poetic, deftly weaving together layers of haunting visuals and sounds. Over the years Santos has fashioned an unassuming style. This evolved partly in opposition to the rationalism and formality of Conceptualism and Minimalism of generations prior, but in concert with the lyrical abstraction of 1950s Brazil. Santos deftly de-forms the colors of video, keying them as if he were a watercolorist. Having started out in the dark ages, before home pages and Skype, he has worked quietly in isolation, away from the metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Merging a strong sense of independence, with a twinkle in his eyes and a healthy sense of skepticism, he exploits his vocabulary as he handles his steadily evolving tools. Despite the fact that Santos has become a perpetual traveler, moving about the globe for festivals and shows, his practice always refers back to his idyllic home in Belo Horizonte. There he skillfully works from his studio, digitally linked to such collaborators as sound artist Stephen Vitiello, based in Richmond, Virginia. Santos remains a Brazilian artist, aware of the socioeconomic relation of technological media and cultural representation. I have never lost sight of the fact that I am using a technology rather foreign to my city and country — in short, there is a gap in the relation between the social and the technological. As a consequence, I always attempt to use our own cultural elements. The current tsunami of miniaturized communications gadgets suits media and sound, which traditionally get around language restraints and territorial barriers. In the near future, i-pods may even become multi-purpose projectors, feeding “cinema” to every other display device, right along with music and the digital videos of Eder Santos. Today the calm pace practiced by Santos suits the high octane pace of a global era rife with attention deficit disorders. Frenetic multitasking and YouTube mania indicate that he is ahead of our time.
Barbara London
Video and Media curator at MoMa NY
