Geometric abstraction
Salvador Santos
(Madrid, Spain)
80 x 100 cm. (31,5 x 39,37 in.) Acrylic on canvas 2018
Salvador´s work shows the influence of European constructivists due to his fascination with Kandinsky and Malévich, as well as the twentieth century American artists belonging to the Hard Edge movement, such as Albers, Stella and Kelly.
His compositions use simple geometric forms combined with more complex ones, creating different planes and transparencies in two-dimensional spaces.
The mastery of his artistic technique allows him to create areas of color with particular clarity and sharpness, using the effects of colors, shapes, lines and areas among themselves, to play with the subjectivity of visual perception. As a result, color becomes a relative phenomenon that changes by its superposition and relationship with other colors, always with the final goal that the same color reaches countless readings.
After a decade residing outside of Spain, the artist has returned to Madrid and works from his studio in Aravaca, dedicated to the creation and experimentation of works of geometric abstraction. Currently, he is preparing various exhibitions and artistic collaborations.
His work is part of important national and international private collections.
He studied Economics Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid and began his professional career working in Corporate Banking in New York. Later, due to the lack of creativity in the field, he returned to Madrid and began his art studies at Pablo Sobish´s workshop, an Argentine painter based in Madrid, where he began experimenting with shapes, colors and textures in an environment oriented towards artistic creation and experimentation.
Convinced of his commitment to art, he returns to the United States to continue his training and specialization, completing arts programs at the Institute of Design in Chicago, an institution founded in 1937 by Moholy-Nagy as The New Bauhaus Shool to continue the work and artistic development of the Bauhaus School (Staatliche Bauhaus), school of design, art and architecture created in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar (Germany).
During this period, Salvador knows in depth the work and philosophy of the Bauhaus movement, which will be decisive for the development of his work, and decides to continue his training by completing a Master of Science in Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, United States.
From this moment, he combines the development of his pictorial work with works of diverse artistic disciplines in different cities of the world: development of digital projects in Chicago, design of single-family residences of modern mid-century architecture in the mountains of Hollywood, Los Angeles CA, as well as advertising and design projects for American multinationals in Madrid.
EXHIBITIONS
- May 2017 Individual exhibition Arco Galería, Madrid, Spain
- February 2018 Colective exhibition Ynot Estudio, Madrid, Spain
- April 2018 Colective exhibition Feria Almoneda Verdegaban. Ifema, Madrid, Spain
- June 2018 Colective exhibition La Galerie. Madrid, Spain
- September 2018 Colective exhibition Affordable Art Fair, New York