Ekphanestaton

Against the backdrop of a crumbling Cartesian logic, Santiago’s paintings are composed of figures that do not clearly stand out from the background; viscera merge with thoughts, bones with the sky. It is unclear which is the front and which is the back, only that they are both separate and connected through the repetition of brushstrokes—multiple layers resulting from fine brushwork. All the elements present in his painting, with their respective meanings and attributes, exist together and simultaneously: what can be observed with the naked eye—and is temporary—can be enumerated, but their inner essence remains a mystery. On Santiago’s canvases, abstract machines are arrayed: loving, thinking, warlike, chloroplasts, all resulting from the excess of a “breath of life.” They are part of a metaphysics of excess, in which art is that “extra” that overflows.

The smallest distance from zero contains an infinity. And the greatest quantities—trillions of years—can be a blink of an eye. The finite contains the infinite, and vice versa. Reality is fractal. Santiago’s painting explores a detachment from certainties such as that Being precedes non-Being, Existence precedes Nothingness, or that the universe would rather be than not be. The creation we are discussing is the result of a line of thought that considers that even in a vacuum, the universe can explode as a result of a small fluctuation, an infinitesimal desire to be that ends up becoming an excess. “The paintings behave like tautological totemic objects that mirror the structure of being itself,” according to the artist. They represent production for the sake of production—that is, residual matter.

Exhibition text by Bogdan Bălan

Santiago Corredor-Vergara (b. 1996, United States) is a Colombian-American artist based in Barcelona. He has a BFA from Cooper Union, completed an exchange program at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and a MAS in Philosophy at the University of Salamanca. In his art he is interested in vitalist existentialism, and the conditions of the West. Ekphanestaton is Santiago’s debut show after nearly a decade in which he has refused to show his work, preferring to retreat his practice to a place of monastic solitude.