Santi Moix

SANTI MOIX (Barcelona, 1960).
Untitled. New York, September 1987.
Oil and material on canvas.
Signed and dated on the back.
Measurements: 195 x 290 cm.

Created shortly after his arrival in New York, this work reflects the collision between his Mediterranean origins and the experience in the American metropolis. The fan, a universal symbol of the struggle against the heat, becomes a metaphor for summer confinement in a psychologically charged space. Through his powerful materiality, his personal iconography and the use of the written word, Santi Moix immerses us in a physical and emotional atmosphere of great intensity. The surface of the painting is extremely rich and textured, with thick impasto and sgraffito.

Minimal drawings, which seem to be scratched on the pictorial surface, place us (along with the small fan) in an interior that is evoked as a sensory remembrance rather than described as a physical space. Moix mixes oil with other materials, possibly sand or marble dust, creating a rough and telluric pictorial layer that evokes chipped walls and the passage of time.

The chromatic range is dominated by greenish, ochre and black tones, colors that reinforce the sensation of a closed and sultry environment. The green, which could be associated with freshness, appears here muddied, almost rusty, while the black of the fan anchors the composition with its visual weight.

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. 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 to 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.