Santiago de Paoli
Lieber Nebelkopf, die Blaue Brücke is open
Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm
Santiago de Paoli, Nebelkopf, 2024, oil on canvas, 241 x 120,5 cm
Courtesy the artist and Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe/Basel
Santiago de Paoli (b. 1978, Buenos Aires) lives and works in New York. Before he decided to train in art, he studied biology. Words, it seems, are hardly the best intermediaries when it comes to capturing his paintings. Perhaps they are better grasped in terms of temperature and weight, states of aggregation and compositions of materials, than description in words – words evoking meanings that can only lead us away from the reality of the painting itself, as opposed to toward it. Towards a reality that wants to be felt.
Santiago de Paoli, Nebelkopf, detail, 2024, oil on canvas, 241 x 120,5 cm
Courtesy the artist and Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe/Basel
“His iconographic frame of reference includes everything from Italian renaissance painting to the surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico to the thematic simplicity and obsessiveness of Giorgio Morandi as well as the antic weirdness of Philip Guston, – one is even tempted to think of the bewitching naïvety of, say, Alfredo Volpi, not to mention children’s books.”
Source: Exhibition text by Chris Sharp for Peintures et hotline, solo exhibition,
1 September–14 October 2018, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, France
It is, after all, a closeness that de Paoli’s paintings demand. They arch, pulsate, rear up; they fever, stagger, bud and surge. They are erotic, intimate, warm – and yet they are never just one of these, but always already something else as well. They are metamorphoses. Unconventional formats and unusual materials (copper, felt, plaster, recycled textiles or wood) often lend them the look of sculptural objects in space.
“The paintings by de Paoli […] are beasts that escape any readymade classification or description.”
Devon Van Houten Maldonado, “Suárez Londoño and de Paoli,” Flash Art, November/December 2017, page 98
Santiago de Paoli, Nebelkopf, detail, 2024, oil on canvas, 241 x 120,5 cm
Courtesy the artist and Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe/Basel
Hinges, as they appear in his painting Coum in Butterfly & Worm, connecting the three felt panels, underscore the function of painting in de Paoli’s oeuvre: painting is a link to what lies beyond the visible – which is not to say the invisible, but rather what we see with our eyes closed, what we feel as we vacillate between sleep and wakefulness, between unconsciousness and consciousness.
“Copper provides magical and unexpected answers.”
Santiago de Paoli (in a conversation)