Santi Moix

SANTI MOIX (Barcelona, 1960).
"Don't know", 2022.
Oil, crayons and colored pencils on canvas.
Signed, dated and titled.
Provenance: Marlborough Gallery.
Measurements: 195 x 185 cm.

In this floral, exuberant and sensual composition, Santi Moix adopts a highly expressive style. Free, gestural and energetic strokes flow almost delicately overflowing the contours, creating a sense of movement in this representation of jasmines and orchids mixed with tropical species. The palette is vibrant and contrasting, with purples and yellows as the dominant tones. The background merges with the form, so that colored filaments proliferate everywhere like confetti, like spores escaping from the stems themselves. The fabric takes on a tactile quality, with generous layers of paint applied with visible brushstrokes. Texture plays an important role in creating the fragrant and enveloping sensation of the sinuous stems and splendid corollas.

Santi Moix has explored the possibilities of matter painting, working with textures and creating beautiful palimpsests. Based in New York City, Santi Moix lives immersed in an incessant search that drives him to work with an astonishing voracity and creativity. His work, direct and daring, is always a field of search, learning and resolution.

A multifaceted creator, Moix also draws and sculpts, but it is in painting where he finds his place of reflection. Although his painting is eminently abstract, Moix has demonstrated on numerous occasions his great capacity for drawing (most recently with his series of works based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). His own language leads him to disturbing and enigmatic creations that sail between abstraction and figuration. The artist assures that, on the other hand, his sculpture drinks from his painting and vice versa, and that they are inseparable, as they are all part of the same journey. His works are like an echo of nature, objects impossible to find in it. Santi Moix's work is characterized by accumulation and fragmentation, sensuality and a poetic sense of form in a flat, dense and vital horizontal space. He breaks with the image of continuity, creates digressions that advance and retreat to build, finally, schematic biomorphic structures. Paintings and sculptures that are elements in movement, like labyrinths that branch out to infinity, and provoke a reflection on a fluctuating world dragged along by the fastness and speed that introduces us into a different time, free, vital, overflowing and passionate. One of the artist's recent works has consisted of rehabilitating a Romanesque church of San Víctor, located in the village of Saurí, in Pallars Sobirà, thus including his mark and motifs in it, bringing his painting into a religious building for the first time, although he has carried out similar actions in museums and public spaces. In 2002 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant.