FRAGMENTS OF THE FAMILIAR

Familiar images do not always tell the same story.

Isabel Santos brings together fragments from magazines and printed materials, reconstructing familiar images in new ways. She looks not only at a face, a gaze, a body, or an image itself, but also at the histories and associations it carries. As each fragment is removed from its original context, it becomes part of a new meaning.

In Santos’s collages, no image completely disappears. Fragments overlap, alter one another’s meanings, and come together to create narratives that did not exist before. This process also recalls the way memory works: some images remain in our minds, some fade away, while others change over time and return to us in different forms.

By revisiting the temporary and consumable images of printed culture, Santos gives them a longer life. An image that once belonged to a magazine page becomes part of another story within the collage. In this way, the familiar moves beyond what we think we already know.

Fragments of the Familiar looks at the world Isabel Santos creates by breaking images apart and bringing them together again. Each collage carries the possibility that a fragment from the past can acquire a new meaning in the present.

Perhaps what we recognize is never entirely the same. Sometimes, to see something familiar differently, we only need to look at its fragments.