Riding Hot with Santiago de Paoli

I don’t understand how its possible that only last June I first came across Santiago De Paoli’s work at the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff Art Basel booth. As someone who appreciates strange, absurd, nonconventional, imperfect, human, and ambiguous work, the Argentinian artist’s work ticks all the boxes, so I instantly fell in love with it. But, looking at the documentation of his current Paris solo, I only scratched the surface of his practice and the mind behind it.

“Words, it seems, are hardly the best intermediaries when it comes to capturing his paintings,” the exhibition text for his 2024 Berlin show noted, adding that, “words evoke meanings that can only lead us away from the reality of the painting itself, as opposed to toward it.” This idea actually reminds me of Camus’ philosophy of the Absurd, which proposes that having a purpose in life blocks you from freely exploring its endless possibilities. I feel this is precisely how De Paoli approaches his work: beyond perhaps nodding to or quoting Italian Renaissance classics, de Chirico’s metaphysical ideas, or Guston’s revolutionary simplification, he works in an endless field of possibilities. Beyond the painted image, their composition, interaction, framing or arrangement, and, finally, how they’re presented in space underline the idea that they’re objects in space.

And his current Parisian solo, Riding Hot (on view during Basel week, so mark your agendas if you’re visiting), is an explosion of all those qualities! The images themselves often use repetition, evocative but resolutely unresolved shapes, and compositions that suggest grand scenes extending beyond the format. And all of it is always so slippery and ambiguous. Perhaps too big for the space and sometimes breaking the DIY frames around them, the body of paintings forms a museum-scale amount of information through a presentation that feels exaggerated, inflated, almost overwhelming. The large canvases cover walls, windows, and room corners, and lean against the walls and each other, emphasizing that De Paoli doesn’t take anything for granted or set in stone, using that artistic or painterly freedom to an extent rarely seen. —Saša Bogojev