Antonio Santín

The gallery is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition of new paintings by Antonio Santín.

Antonio Santín is well known for his adroit rendering of elegant Persian rugs that encapsulate technical precision and innovative compositions. Alluding to concealed anthropomorphic forms, their sculptural qualities make one question whether his fabricated reality is more real than your own. Much like the Gobelins Manufactory was to luxurious Renaissance tapestries, Santín’s approach to his signature trompe l’oeil paintings focus on arresting intricate details and surface textures.

Santín’s new work arrives with bold punches of color that further dissolves figurative allusions in his work. One could read these new works as modern rugs or fully non-objective abstract compositions using only hues and geometries similar to abstract painters of the post-war period. In Apaña (2018) a unique fusion of Josef Albers sharp and boldly colored squares with the fuzzy, blurred palette of Mark Rothko, Santín subverts the experience of flat color field paintings by ‘crumpling’ the very view.

Santín’s arresting and highly tactile works with its uncannily realistic application of shadow and highlight tempt the viewer to reach out and run their hand over the rug’s pile, which is after all a two-dimensional painting on the canvas mounted on the wall.

Antonio Santín, born in Madrid, Spain in 1978, works and resides in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Degree in Fine Arts from Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2005. His work has been exhibited in international museums, including Knoxville Museum of Art, TN, US, and is represented in collections of Centre National de Arts Plastiques, Paris, and in private collections worldwide. His public installations include a permanent sculpture commissioned by the city of Madrid in 2003. In 2016, his works were shown at the Sharjah Art Museum for the of the nineteenth edition of the Islamic Art Festival. In 2017-2018 his work was included in “Between I & Thou” at Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY.