An ocean big enough to swallow all fact and fable, Armig Santos delves into the poetics of the Caribbean much like The Hudson River School looked to landscapes for a spiritual component. Fresh off the heels of participating in The Whitney Museum exhibition “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” Santos debuts a suite of new paintings at half gallery LA. The show title refers to the first painting from a series of eight pictures which he started back in 2021 and just completed this past month. “I've been thinking a lot about blue, water, submergence and emergence, meditation, contemplation, spirituality, beauty, politics, and art history,” explains Santos. Heavily influenced by Impressionism, Romanticism, as well as Titian's use of blue, he reminds use that all art - in the vein of Duchamp’s bicycle wheel - double as vehicles for contemplation. It was Gerard Richter who said “art is the highest form of hope” so no surprise that the self-portrait here is entitled “Hope,” serving both as a prayer towards self-actualization and an insistence that any perspective is a choice.