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Mario Santoro - Woith
Born	(1968-03-23) 23 March 1968 Havana, Cuba
Nationality	Italy
Education	Sapienza University of Rome
Known for	Art and Photography
Website	www.santoro-woith.com

Mario Santoro - Woith (born 1968 in Cuba) is an Italian Fine-art photographer and artist. He studied Visual Anthropology at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” from 1988 to 1993. He is a Todi (Umbria) based artist. His Italian background has given him a very specific approach to Art. In his words: “anachronistic and oneiric”. The connection of art and handicraft is an important part of the Italian culture. As a result, he enjoys researching and developing new techniques and styles through a slow, sophisticated and exacting hand process. The “old fashioned method of connecting the brain with the hands without a computer in between”.

Early years (1986-1992)

Santoro Woith began as a classic photographer working in a very traditional manner, doing documentary, portraits and architectural photography. He has been photographing extensively since the age of 14. During the early years of his career, he also had experience in different areas of photography, such as photojournalism, architectural as well as stage photography.

Work

Santoro-Woith’s work has been exhibited internationally and his work is held in public and private collections and institutions.

Latest works

The latest work represents a return to documentary photography. The influence of the different medias used over the past years remains very important . These works are in fact printed with Electrophotography (LED head) technique, with Organic Photoconductor Drum and closed toner system, on special and unusual papers, such as black recycled paper, rice paper and other handmade papers. The work is in black and white, and highlights “places that do not exist”: the objects and environments which surround us in our daily life: gas stations, highways, tunnels, trucks. The work explores “non-interesting places and events” and questions the common notion of photography associated with exceptional moments or places. Santoro-Woith does the opposite, and photographs the ordinary – everyday – sights, the “unnoticed landscapes of his time”.

The goal of his visual research is to extrapolate the perverted uniqueness of the ordinary, the smell of gasoline, the pollution, the look of endless sequences of road signs and advertisements. On a wider scale, his interest is in the deterioration of the quality of life and alienation: "I am mesmerized by a group of abandoned vehicles on the side of a highway, like the skeletons of dinosaurs found at the end of an era. Gas stations seem to me an oasis in a desert, where migrants stop to recover during their trips with no destination. Oil company logos seem to me religious icons, trucks are elephants, advertisement boards are desperate requests… : “buy me, buy me”…. And all this in a desert continuum with no beginning and no end”.

Artist’s books

From 1998 to 2013 Mario Santoro-Woith has self-published five artist's – limited edition - books. The imagery in these books aims to provoke questions, and he acknowledges that his work can create negative emotions. The visual research displayed in these books explores the darker part of humanity and draws our attention to evil in all its guises - racism, pornography, terrorism etc. It sometimes seems that he aims to push the boundaries as far as he can. In his first book, he looks at propaganda and the form it takes in architecture (the EUR book), in the next book, he visually explores imperialism (Decadence, Darkness, Empire) and in the last one, the focus is on symbolism (More War, Less Art). From the atomic bomb, to hard core pornography through concentration camps, a juxtaposition of images reveals A subject in common in these books: the power of man over man. The books present photographic techniques, drawing, screen printing and other mixed media. He designs and prints them in his studio. The print is in 4 colors, printed one at a time (black, white, red and blue). The result is tridimensional multi-layer print. These books are hand bound in Perugia, Italy. Each copy is numbered and signed. From 2010 to 2012 he was one of the artists of the ABC Artists' Books Cooperative The book trilogy, EUR, Decadence Darkness Empire and More War Less Art were acquired by the Library Council Collection of artist’s books of Museum of Modern Art (New York) in 2011.

Experimental Photography (1992 – 2000)

Early experimental work includes references to the tradition of reproducing monuments of art and he continues this tradition. Mixing familiar images of Italy with new mediums, he empathizes with the contemporaneous and his work continually challenges to encompass the developments in visual communication and technology. In these years, he began an extensive use of photocopying machines and industrial machines mixed with photography. With these machines and techniques, he created gigantic works and installations - rolls that span meters. He developed many skills, working with at least 30 different machines (some of which were modified for his work) over a period of 20 years. He believes that photocopies are no less sophisticated than any other artistic printing process, and consistently encourages the documentation of artworks made with these techniques and the creation of public and private collections. These techniques, allowed him to “favor texture and variation overlaying the positive and negatives and multilayering colors and emotions”.

References

Category:Italian photographers Category:1968 births Category:Living people Category:Italian artists