Antonio Santin
OFRENDA
August 25, 2007 – October 13, 2007
Antonio Santin has a passion for painting. He monumentally opposes current contemporary painting in format and expression to invoke a painting that draws its energy and dynamic from the creative force found in the knowledge of death and passion.
The appearance of the masculine portraits is powerfully suggestive and dispenses with any kind of weakness, whereas the photorealistic painting of the female portraits reposes in a spiritual exaltation. Created in Barcelona, Santin thematically and consequentially selected animal carcasses found at the abattoir for his new series of paintings. He arranges hanging animal halves, presents still lifes consisting of pieces of flesh and shows pig’s heads in portrait; painting as a continual battle against advancing decay and decomposition. The title of the series ‘naturaleza muerta’ refers accurately and ambiguously to the content of the images. It is an unremitting annihilation of transience through spiritualization and the allusion to living nature and its ultimate destiny: death.
In Autorretrato (self portrait), Santin brings his own being into the context of his topic area. He faces us defiantly and scabrously while bloodlike cyanide red paint drips over the canvass. In the invariability of death, like the cyanide red that flows over the canvass and face, life rears up in full and lustful colours.
Santin’s passion and obsession for the sensory world and the sensuality in painting knows of the finality of life, of his guilt, of death and its permanently threatening presence. With his painting he captures earthly beauty and the defeating moment of its transience. His portraits are marked with the triumph of life over death in power, spirituality and carnality. The title of the exhibition ‘Ofrenda’ can be read as an offering against transience.
The appearance of the masculine portraits is powerfully suggestive and dispenses with any kind of weakness, whereas the photorealistic painting of the female portraits reposes in a spiritual exaltation. Created in Barcelona, Santin thematically and consequentially selected animal carcasses found at the abattoir for his new series of paintings. He arranges hanging animal halves, presents still lifes consisting of pieces of flesh and shows pig’s heads in portrait; painting as a continual battle against advancing decay and decomposition. The title of the series ‘naturaleza muerta’ refers accurately and ambiguously to the content of the images. It is an unremitting annihilation of transience through spiritualization and the allusion to living nature and its ultimate destiny: death.
In Autorretrato (self portrait), Santin brings his own being into the context of his topic area. He faces us defiantly and scabrously while bloodlike cyanide red paint drips over the canvass. In the invariability of death, like the cyanide red that flows over the canvass and face, life rears up in full and lustful colours.
Santin’s passion and obsession for the sensory world and the sensuality in painting knows of the finality of life, of his guilt, of death and its permanently threatening presence. With his painting he captures earthly beauty and the defeating moment of its transience. His portraits are marked with the triumph of life over death in power, spirituality and carnality. The title of the exhibition ‘Ofrenda’ can be read as an offering against transience.
