Born in Tomelloso (Spain),1975

Lives and works in Gijn and Berlin


Santiago Lara has a degree in Fine Arts by the University Complutense of Madrid. His artistic itinerary is full of awards and grants like the Prize "Francisco Carretero" of the Province Council of Ciudad Real (2001), the Grant Leonardo da Vinci of Paris (2002), the Prize "Antonio Lpez Garca" (2005), the Grant AlNorte 2007 for the project "Bosque Interior" or the subsidy for the project "Hombre-Medicina" (2007). Between 2000 and 2007 Santiago took many specialization courses and participated in several collective exhibitions.
With "Brotes", the painting series of 2007, presented in his first individual exhibition of Gijn, Santiago Lara showed his interest in turning painting into an experimental communications mean that combined tradition with a conceptual imprint that opened horizons to the direct expression. The painter showed he was already inside the spirit of his era with an unequivocal German vocation, which would be later reinforced by his condition of artist in the Kunstlerhaus Glogauer of Berlin

His work can be understood as an intent to give back a reflexive and critical character to painting. For this he extends his view over the 20th century alluding to a soft surrealism and some echoes of pop-art to flow into the new generations of painters, above all the Germans Neo Rauch, Martin Kippenberger and Daniel Richter who face the role of the painter in the new visual culture. But the fictions of Santiago Lara, without either the political or the historical burden of those artists mentioned, are constructed with fragments of the reality, experiences which find a pictorial accommodation influenced by comics and poster art.

In this sense his painting is based on drawing and colour, a quick and informal painting which produces a sensation of immediacy. This iconography, integrated with history of art, establishes new visual relations which are touched by irony and hint at various critical aspects of reality. Colour proves to be of special relevance as Juan Jos lvarez Fernndez points out in the Papeles Plsticos by being chosen with calculated intention to moderate the burden of existential tension. Apart from gestures, the colours, uniform and plain, are principally the element that constitutes the compositions.

The artist moves between narration and pictorial poetics. Accordingly his works tend either towards the production of meanings or they construct more formal aspects. But in the majority of his compositions we find disturbing and confusing elements which do not fall towards the dramatic as is the case in the work Farmer in which a farmer fertilizes the soil by means of a funnel, the soil being personified by a succession of bodies. They are always elliptical and critical narratives, discourses which, as the artist sets out, come from my own sensitive experiences of fragmentation.

Without doubt Santiago Lara has assimilated multiple influences to flow into his own painting which is involved in the current cultural concepts and which shows a commendable figurativeness which equally assimilates pictures from advertising, the media and popular tales. And he handles all this with a pictorial casualness which pretends to have technical shortcomings and still there is, underneath this layer of inadequacies, which, in fact, they are not at all, a sufficient sensitivity to question the role of painting in these moving times and to ask about its function and fragility. And maybe we will not find answers, but the survival of the pictorial depends to a great extent on our daring to ask such questions.
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