JORGE LUIS SANTOS

Jorge Luis Santos (b. Quivicán, Cuba, 1973, lives and works in Miami, FL) creates visceral, abstract works on a monumental scale. Throughout his long and celebrated career, he has continued to experiment––in material (in addition to acrylic, he has worked in oil, mixed media, found objects, iron, and wood); in form (painting, sculpture, and installation); in palette; and in process (in some works he has used a brush taped to a long pole, a palette knife, his hands, the sole of his shoe as mark-making tools and most recently a mop). In 2018 Santos published the book Jorge Luis Santos, encompassing his oeuvre from 1998 to 2016, with the collaboration of collectors Jorge Pérez and Mario José Hernández and a selection of texts by the most renowned Cuban art critics such as Rufo Caballero, Nelson Herrera Ysla, Silvia Llanes, among others. His work has been internationally exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at institutions, galleries, and art fairs since 1994.

In the most recent interview Out of the ordinary, A conversation with Jorge Luis Santos by the curator Maylin Pérez, Santos declared: “I have never really characterized myself as a figurative painter. My work was intentionally accepting and incorporating abstraction as a language, with the occasional hint of abstract expressionism and informalism. I feel that it sympathizes more with my spirit and my way of living. As Willem de Kooning said in an interview: “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. “I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in—drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.”