Confluence

Digital Art

Is it fine art or it is fashion photography? Or is it both? When looking at the photographs outside of the contexts of a fashion magazine one concludes they could easily be exhibited in the gallery or a museum and vice versa, blurring the lines between the two realms. Merging of the fashion and art worlds began in the 80’s, continued in the 90’s and nowadays has climbed to its highest peak – with fashion being exhibited in the museums. Santiago Rueda’s work substantiates all the aforementioned. His fine artwork echoes his affinity towards fashion.

At the same time, it also spans to another genre. With being deeply inspired by different modern art movements, his oeuvre conveys great conversance of art history. Appreciating the history of photography, he pays homage to daguerreotype and classical black and white photography with his unique contemporary touch, intervening on the surface of an image by adding horizontal and vertical color stripes or a splash of color from painter’s brush. Working both with digital and analog cameras, he creates a play of traditional and contemporary. Red light resembling the errors in developing a film is an often feature in is his digital imagery. The vivid and bright palette of colors, vibrating from the surface of the images is an omnipresent element in his opus.

Santiago Rueda’s work also reflects the heritage of Cubism and Futurism. The Cubist touch the artist brings into a photograph shows us the subject being analyzed from many different angles. The subject undergoes a process of scattering and reassembling in an abstracted form. The artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints, be it a woman’s portrait or a fashion accessory the model is wearing, making it the faceted surface. Particularly in his fruition of artwork, the artist succeeds in bringing the dynamic motion when portraying a model.

Santiago Rueda’s fine artwork is a heterogeneous assembly of styles, a thriving crossover of art and fashion imagery, or as a famous photographer Lisette Model once stated: ’Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest.’

I. Jović
Art Historian