Santiago Lara at ART DEMO DAY

Cologne

Santiago Lara plays with the known and the unexpected. The Spanish artist uses an imaginary yet accurate language to depict an art standing in-between a dreamy and real land experimenting with art as a communication tool.

Santiago Lara obtained his art degree at the University Complutense of Fine Arts in Madrid. His pedigree shows a wide recognition with Prizes such as the ‘Grant Leonardo da Vinci of Paris’ in 2002 and the Prize ‘Antonio Lopez Garca’ in 2005. He currently lives and works in between Gijn and Berlin place that impact on his practice as a painter.

From November 21 on, his works will be on display in the group exhibition ART DEMO DAY. Florian Waldvogel, the curator of the show, sat down with Santiago Lara to talk art and politics.

Florian Waldvogel: What has been formative during your studies?
Santiago Lara: During my period of formation in the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid, one of the things that influenced me the most was the relationship with my fellow students. The conversations between us in the workshops and during the outdoor activities such as openings, exhibitions and museums were really inspiring. This exchange of ideas between colleagues has been very important for my later artistic development, shaping a very personal and rich imaginary.

FW: To what extent are social references important for your work?
SL: In my work I use countless social references from elements of the already existing popular culture. In a natural and deliberate way I concentrate several stories in the same pictorial image, as in the case of the representation of the personage of Jesús Malverde, the “narco’s Saint”, a popular personage of the Mexican popular culture that I turn into the patron Saint of the weakest. References to the supernatural is a constant in my work, but from a metaphorical vision that shows our society in a critical and ironic form. I always mix identities that are socially recognized, as in the case of “Bus Stop”, where I painted a portrait of two spectres waiting for a bus that never arrives, one of them is the death dressed as a priest reading a book with green cobras. The colour symbolizes the death in the work of the poet Federico García Lorca.

FW: What is an exhibition?
SL: An exhibition is a complex knot of relations around a fixed idea. This idea, from its starting point to production and final display, has a fixed life and makes several agents interact with each other. We, the artists, are members of an exhibition, but the final work is not the most important thing. The core of an exhibition is the synergies generated around it and the way the spectators complete the aforesaid work. An exhibition is a process where ideas, budgets, social relations and possibilities work in a fixed period of time and in one or several concrete places, where work comes to sense.

ART DEMO DAY

Read the interview in German / Zum Interview auf Deutsch