Antonio Santín

Antonio Santín (b. 1978, Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Madrid. Known for his meticulous, hand-crafted technique, Santín designs and creates unique surfaces that blur the line between illusion and abstraction, and between East and West. His labor-intensive process, which can take up to a year to complete, transforms oil on canvas into intricate, tactile compositions that challenge perception and cultural understanding.

Drawing from the traditions of Spanish tenebrism and Italian chiaroscuro, Santín manipulates light and shadow to amplify depth and texture, making his carpets appear almost sculptural. He describes his work as “more real than reality itself”—a statement that speaks to his fascination with the interplay between meticulous detail and optical illusion. From a distance, his paintings deceive the eye with their striking realism, but up close, they dissolve into a mesmerizing, fractal-like interplay of color and form, revealing their abstract foundations.

Santín earned his Fine Arts degree from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and studied at the Athens Fine Arts School. His most recent exhibition at Marc Straus Gallery was met with critical and commercial success, leading to acquisitions by numerous collections and institutions. He has exhibited at museums such as the Ithra Museum, Saudi Arabia; the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; the Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY; the Farjam Foundation, Dubai, UAE; and the Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival, Sharjah, UAE. His work has also been exhibited at Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY; Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; and the Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, Germany. Santín's paintings are in numerous museum and private collections worldwide, including the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA and the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL.