2024
— Espacio Acoyte, made possible by Moria Galeria
Buenos Aires, Argentina
MELANCHOLY AND FUTURE
If we could always look at images without thinking about their history, it would be natural to first focus on the shapes, the contrast of colors, the path of the lines, and then on the memories they bring to mind. Santiago Paredes' paintings are innocent in this sense: they hide nothing and resist interpretation. Perhaps for this reason, they do not carry the solemnity of something that defines itself before coming on stage. In them, there is a playful charm that only leisure, or better yet, boredom, can provide. The softness of certain surfaces, the careful passage of time that wears things down, the entire universe we see when we close our eyes while a song plays. In his studio, Santiago says something I like: that as the world hardens, he softens. And to soften is less about losing structure than gaining dispersion in a good way.
Melancholy and future confront us with something like a lyricism of the everyday, where spaces, objects, and the beings of the closest intimacy fit together to form a single, embraced, and indissoluble piece.
Like a method, translations maneuver insistently not to reach an increasingly better result (more complete, more closed, with fewer gaps), but to disrupt a machine that constantly feels like breaking down. A first translation, from drawing to painting: it starts with a doodle that, as an exercise to ward off tedium, ends up hanging on the wall like a trophy and over the days transforms into a painting of enormous dimensions. But the drawing is not discarded; it stays there as a discovery and emblem of some kind of personal mythology. And then it repeats, changes shape, and reappears in the paintings, jumping between the furniture and rooms of a house.
Another translation serves as a corridor between the two worlds that, to put it quickly and without giving way to old questions, share weight and substance in our hearts: the virtual and the real. As if the two served as mutual refuges, as if the logic of each could transpose without any regard for consequences. The glitch on the screen transfers to the canvas and the distortion doubles, while the backgrounds and figures repel each other, leaving a tiny empty space where the mind can rest. The spirit of the mouse wanders through the works with the compulsion of an addict, ignoring their materiality, wanting to change the vases' positions, threatening to delete everything.
If we understand these translations as recombinations of elements, a free transition from one state to another without implying a final or definitive destination, what stands out clearly is the bad joke of adulthood. Contrary to all expectations, to mature is to become more tender and sweet. To soften while everything hardens is also to escape the world's rapid pace, to slow down the attention we pay to things. These scenes and faces bring something from childhood, not as a distant memory but as the first practical application of taste.
An artist who softens is more prone to impurity and becomes less self-referential (something to celebrate). In Santiago Paredes' fantasy, adolescents and animals curl up in their little beds to make way for the effective dream of a neon future.
Sibila Gálvez Sánchez
⇑
2024
— Espacio Acoyte, made possible by Moria Galeria
Buenos Aires, Argentina
MELANCHOLY AND FUTURE
If we could always look at images without thinking about their history, it would be natural to first focus on the shapes, the contrast of colors, the path of the lines, and then on the memories they bring to mind. Santiago Paredes' paintings are innocent in this sense: they hide nothing and resist interpretation. Perhaps for this reason, they do not carry the solemnity of something that defines itself before coming on stage. In them, there is a playful charm that only leisure, or better yet, boredom, can provide. The softness of certain surfaces, the careful passage of time that wears things down, the entire universe we see when we close our eyes while a song plays. In his studio, Santiago says something I like: that as the world hardens, he softens. And to soften is less about losing structure than gaining dispersion in a good way.
Melancholy and future confront us with something like a lyricism of the everyday, where spaces, objects, and the beings of the closest intimacy fit together to form a single, embraced, and indissoluble piece.
Like a method, translations maneuver insistently not to reach an increasingly better result (more complete, more closed, with fewer gaps), but to disrupt a machine that constantly feels like breaking down. A first translation, from drawing to painting: it starts with a doodle that, as an exercise to ward off tedium, ends up hanging on the wall like a trophy and over the days transforms into a painting of enormous dimensions. But the drawing is not discarded; it stays there as a discovery and emblem of some kind of personal mythology. And then it repeats, changes shape, and reappears in the paintings, jumping between the furniture and rooms of a house.
Another translation serves as a corridor between the two worlds that, to put it quickly and without giving way to old questions, share weight and substance in our hearts: the virtual and the real. As if the two served as mutual refuges, as if the logic of each could transpose without any regard for consequences. The glitch on the screen transfers to the canvas and the distortion doubles, while the backgrounds and figures repel each other, leaving a tiny empty space where the mind can rest. The spirit of the mouse wanders through the works with the compulsion of an addict, ignoring their materiality, wanting to change the vases' positions, threatening to delete everything.
If we understand these translations as recombinations of elements, a free transition from one state to another without implying a final or definitive destination, what stands out clearly is the bad joke of adulthood. Contrary to all expectations, to mature is to become more tender and sweet. To soften while everything hardens is also to escape the world's rapid pace, to slow down the attention we pay to things. These scenes and faces bring something from childhood, not as a distant memory but as the first practical application of taste.
An artist who softens is more prone to impurity and becomes less self-referential (something to celebrate). In Santiago Paredes' fantasy, adolescents and animals curl up in their little beds to make way for the effective dream of a neon future.
Sibila Gálvez Sánchez
⇑
