054 http://www.AmericanArtCollector.com
reason to be together—just like the beautiful realism in
a scene rendered in crosshatch, smudges of charcoal
and dabs of test paint—and yet the artist has overlapped
their stories in an intentional manner to tell a story of
his making.
A remarkable byproduct of these “incomplete” paint-
ings is how the viewers’ eyes tends to fill in the painting
to the desired layer. Although only a third of Page 41,
Wild is in color, it doesn’t require much for the brain to
fill in what’s not rendered in detail or color, as if by some
automatic translation mechanism. Or the other way
around: it’s easy to picture the boy as a drawing when
the rest of the work is in charcoal. There is freedom in
his style, enough that the momentum from that alone
propels the eye through each work. “It definitely creates
the potential for a lot of imagination. Your mind can
run free. Your interpretation will be based on your
subconscious, and while there are hints to what’s going
on there’s enough there to still think about,” he says.
“I didn’t invent anything with these paintings. I think
most artists have done this before. Maybe they’ll leave
some sketch exposed or maybe a surface. Most studies
do that. The difference here with these pieces is I’m
calling explicit attention to it. Here it is.”
This is not the first time Santos has embarked
on a journey within the construct of art itself. His
earlier series Syncretism took different styles of art
and smooshed them together, creating unique new
comments on art from different movements, genres
and time periods. The mashups included Botticelli
with Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci with Willem de
Kooning, Venus de Milo with Takashi Murakami and
many others. Pages, which will include paintings made32