Armig Santos’ contemplative Caribbean landscapes converse with Kiván Quiñones’ found object sculptures in LLEGÓ A MI ALMA, SURGIÓ EN MI MEMORIA; transporting the viewer into a territory rife with emotion and impregnated with memory. Quietly pensive and yet charged with powerful socio-political commentary, Santos and Quiñones share an interest in piecing together a particular understanding of the island where they grew up and currently live through their works. Exploring history and its relationship to collective memory, objecthood, representation, and the inevitable intermingling of past and present, they offer a view of Puerto Rico from the inside out.
Full of reverence for the natural world, Santos’ gestural and expressive paintings combine the landscapes of Puerto Rico with an exploration of its obscured histories as well as the reality of life on the island. On a similar note, Quiñones’ exploration centers around analyzing history and contrasting it to memory. While investigating various aspects of the ancestral cultures that inform his identity, Quiñones attempts to bridge past and present by creating forms that juxtapose historic artifacts with elements of contemporary reality. Fostering a dialogue that reconnects us with the forgotten, abandoned, or what can be understood as the historic debris of memory, his sculptures allow imagination to take flight —thus fusing the recognizable and unrecognizable. The seashell phones acting as communication devices at the service of the intuitive knowledge that constantly emerges from within.
A song from the sea seems to reverberate throughout the gallery, with Santos’ paintings looking outwards onto sublime Caribbean landscapes or inwards towards specific moments from the island’s history; while Quiñones’ sculptures highlight the significance or meaning of particular objects, tracing their echo in the present. Insular and expansive, Santos’ paintings are both local and universal, with German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich or French artist Pierre Bonnard sharing equal weight among his references to that of Puerto Rican painter Rafael Ferrer or local composer Ismael Rivera. Similarly, Quiñones mines the cultural archive of his ancestors whilst looking to Post-Modern artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol as models for the critical appropriation of imagery, or at André Breton and others in terms of formulating and presenting seemingly surreal objects.

Connected to Puerto Rico via art, poetry and music, Santos and Quiñones voyeuristically look at existence on the island through their works. Making a study of Puertorican artistic production and taking into account the history of art —which inevitably includes European depictions of the Caribbean as Other— they reappropriate the tools of image-making and come up with a local understanding of history, memory and place.

Thus subverting the narratives imposed on the island and seeking to empower the residents of Puerto Rico and beyond. Sourced from Ismael Rivera’s song ‘Si Te Contara’, the exhibition’s title encapsulates their relationship with the sea —one that activates past experiences, pushes forward creation, connects them to a collective consciousness, and translates into a deep desire to deepen into the mystery of living surrounded by water, which is both guardian and menace. A body of water that washes away whilst simultaneously acting as a receptacle of memory.

Armig Santos lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2018 he received a BFA in Painting from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño in San Juan, PR. His most recent solo exhibitions include Memoria at Half Gallery, NY (2024); and Yellow Flowers at Calderón Gallery, NY (2022). He has also participated in exhibitions like TAMO AQUÍ/WE HERE at Embajada, San Juan, PR (2023); Nature Holds a Mirror with Ambar Qujano, online (2023); NÜ MOON at New Image Art, LA (2022); Cosmic Connections, Calderón Gallery, NY (2022); and Nunca es Suficiente, KM 0.2, Santurce, PR (2021). His work has also been shown at The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; with one of his large-scale paintings having been acquired by the same. Additionally, Santos co-curated Papo Colo’s Procesión-Migración with the support of MOMA PS1.

Based in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Quiñones has a BA in Communication from the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce. Quiñones recent solo exhibitions include Everything I had But couldn’t keep at Recinto Cerra, PR (2023); A Brief Narration of the Destruction at KM 0.2, San Juan, PR (2023); Bajo el cielo… Sobre la tierra at MUSAN, Santurce, PR (2022); Me Llaman at Dragon Crab Turtle, St. Louis, MO (2022); Entre Sueños, Entidades at Amor Fuego, Santurce, PR (2021); and In the Peak of Fana at POP Projects, Santurce, PR (2020). A selection of group exhibitions includes GENERATION NEXT at El Schomburg, Chicago, IL (2024); PINTURA CONTEMPORÁNEA DE PFKNR at Publica, San Juan, PR (2024); Subasta 2024 at MAPR, San Juan, PR (2024); Charismatic Goods at CANADA, Tribeca, NY (2024); Puto Calor at Souvenir, San Juan, PR (2024); Arcadian Revival at Macedonia Institute, Gante, NY (2024); among others.

ARTWORKS

Untitled, 2024
Oil on canvas
182.9 cm x 152.4
Teléfono Caracol II, 2024
Found objects
Variable dimensions
Untitled, 2024
Oil on canvas
28 x 35.5 cm
Teléfono Caracol I, 2024
Found objects
Variable dimensions
Untitled, 2024
Oil on canvas
101.6 x 76.2 x 3.8 cm (each)
Untitled, 2024
Oil on jute
152.4 x 121.9 cm
Untitled, 2024
Oil on canvas
101.6 x 76.2 cm
Teléfono Caracol III, 2024
Found objects
Variable dimensions

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