ARMIG SANTOS

Memoria

Artist Reception: June 5th, 6-8 PM

June 5th - July 3rd, 2024

A ocean big enough to swallow all fact and fable, a mirror to our emotional landscape, both a protector and source of danger.

Living and working in San Juan, Armig Santos’ paintings often feel epistolary in their lyricism and content - letters from the frontline of his intuition. The centerpiece of Armig’s new show at Half Gallery is a large boat painting inspired by the Cerro Maravilla murders of 1978. In late July of that year, two Puerto Rican pro-independence activists were ambushed and killed by police who later tried to justify their actions by categorizing these young men as terrorists. Armig imagines a scene where Arnaldo Darío Rosado-Torres and Carlos Enrique Soto-Arriví escaped - perhaps by sea - on a vessel named after the poet Antonin Artaud. The foregrounding of ocean here is a flotilla of Monet waterlilies. Artaud also happens to be the name of the best 70’s Argentinian rock album by Luis Alberto Spinetta, which were all songs interpreting his poetry.

The dreamlike quality of the image speaks to Arming Santos confluence of influences be it Delacroix’s “Shipwreck of Don Juan” or a legendary tightrope walker or the filming of a trap video at his local beach or a fictive animal - some tattooed beast out of Michelangelo’s Torment of St Anthony.

Armig Santos (b. 1995, Caguas, Puerto Rico), received a BFA in Painting from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico in 2018. Santos has exhibited at Half Gallery, Los Angeles; Deli Gallery, New York; Calderon, New York; Embajada, Puerto Rico; KM 0.2, Santurce, Puerto Rico. Santos co-curated Papo Colo’s Procesión-Migración in Puerto Rico with the support of MoMA PS1 in 2017 and was in a group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2022. Santos lives and works in San Juan.