José John Santos III: The Space that Connects
Nunu Fine Art Taipei is pleased to announce The Space that Connects ,its first solo exhibition of Manila-based artist José John Santos III (b.1970). Santos employs a wide variety of techniques, such as collage, drawing, painting, and resin casting, to examine the shifting relationship between positive and negative space, where absence becomes presence and destruction becomes creation.
Santos’ choice of materials and processes of creation reinforce his interest in perception, representation, and re-presentation. The cyclical process of collage—cutting, sticking, layering, and erasing—relies on positive and negative space equally to construct a composition, while resin casting literalizes material transformation from negative space (molds) into positive space (casts). In both processes, what is removed informs what emerges and each action is a negotiation between making and unmaking. Through this alternation, viewers are invited to consider where meaning resides—not only in the object, but in the space surrounding it and the gestures that shaped it.
Assembly Line (2025) is composed of over 500 castings of the shell of a crab, unique to the southern Philippines, known as the ‘curacha,’ which is beloved as a street snack and local delicacy. Much like the cow depicted in the collages, The Shape Behind the Shape, the consumption of the crab’s flesh transforms the positive space of the crab into the negative space of the shell. Santos’ use of fragments of commonplace objects, such as crab shells, scaffolding, street signs, and architectural elements, as molds and references for painting and drawing points to his interest in how objects or sites hovering between construction or degradation can indicate both unknown pasts and future possibilities simultaneously. Santos finds meaning in states of becoming as the site of true creation.