Cheese Moon Nights

Archipelago

Jun 24 — Aug 27, 2023

Santiago de Paoli was the second artist-in-residence at Archipelago Hudson Valley. Archipelago is an arts-and-research institute devoted to spirituality, thinking, and healing. At a constellation of sites across the globe, we host exhibitions, artists’ residencies, and a growing research library. Our inaugural site is in Germantown, NY, overlooking the Hudson River and aims to bring together a capacious approach to the arts with sustained attention towards our place in nature.

Santiago de Paoli’s painting might seem surprising to the viewer. At first glance, the artist appears to be representing a number of common themes and elements, such as moons, candles, lamps, socks, nuts, flowers and skies with clouds. But his work requires being contemplated through a feeling of curiosity, allowing the visitor to discover a personal view. Despite the varied and sometimes unusual materials the artist adapts to create his compositions, the economy of means and personal choice of aesthetic formalisms ties the work together, with a disruptive sense of humor and a childlike innocence.

In his paintings, de Paoli has long experimented with unusual grounds, applying oil paint to felt, plaster, ceramic, and board. With a surrealist sensibility, he has embraced fragmented objects, disjoint interior spaces, mundane objects, fruits and vegetables, and references to the body.

After moving to the Western Catskills in New York state in 2020, de Paoli discovered a new, reflective material—thin, rolled sheets of copper—which he transforms into hand-formed panels, upon which he paints. de Paoli combines a deeply personal approach to subject matter with a refined sense of craft. What he makes is at once the byproduct of and continuous with the elaboration of his own unique pictorial universes and ways of perceiving the world.

The artist is inspired by the materials, motifs, surroundings, and experiences of his residence in upstate New York. The sheets of copper, sourced by de Paoli from a local building supply store, are reminiscent of one 17th-century painting the artist first saw in a museum in Paris, a work which has since fascinated de Paoli for its luminosity and oddity.

Santiago de Paoli’s recent projects and solo exhibitions include Inside the Red Barn, OS- MOS Station, Stamford, New York, USA, 2022; A leaf in the wind, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris-Romainville, France, 2021; Bebê Rasteja, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil, 2019—2020; Entre nosotros y el objeto, Môvil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2016; Pescado y Papas, Wireless Ridge, Stanley, Falkland Islands, 2015; The New Society, Swan Coach House Gallery, Atlanta, USA, 2007.

Among other group shows, his work has been presented at X Museum, Beijing, China, 2021; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019; Nouveau musée national de Monaco, Villa Paloma, Monaco, 2018; Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, France, 2018; and Lulu Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico, 2017.