Santiago Llanos Gutierrez

2.4 mts height painting on canvas taped to the wall of an underground spiral staircase depicting the same space it is in.

José Santiago Llanos Gutiérrez (1993) is an artist born and raised in Santiago, Chile. He graduated in 2018 with a Bachelor's Degree in Visual Arts from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has exhibited his work in solo shows in Chile, highlighting "Perplejismos" (2022, Santiago, Chile) and "Paisajes de Autoayuda" (2021, Santiago, Chile), and in collective exhibitions internationally, highlighting “FAST” (2023, OMA Gallery, Chile), “The Walls Are See Through” (2023, Emerald Gallery, London, UK), “Works on Paper” (2023, Thames Side Studios, London, UK) and “Mera Coincidencia” (2022, Santiago, Chile). He has as well worked in residencies and collaborative art projects among which “Usted está AquÍ” (2018, Santiago, Chile) and “Llegó de Melinka” (2020, Guaitecas, Chile) stand out. In 2022, he was awarded with a grant by The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and he moved to the United Kingdom to complete a master's degree in painting at the Royal College of Art.

Portrait of the artist wearing hi-vis outfit, on roadworks site, performing a plein air cityscape session.

I wonder every day what “the real world” could be. Going outside to paint “from life” in the era of digital media, as once painters did according to history books, is the game that I´m playing to point out how shocking it is the existence of all the phenomena surrounding us. In the limitations and in the problems that this operation brings, I find a spicy taste of reality. I take the performance of “plein air” cityscapes as a way of interrogating the contemporary city while connecting randomly with its inhabitants and its secret forces. Abstraction and figuration dance in and out of my cooking pot. I paint on surfaces I pick up from wandering and exploring the same landscapes that I represent, looking in them for challenges and surprises in material and composition. My pictorial practice is at the same time an empirical record of my life and a strategy for creating spaces between my experience and that of others.