Katia Santibañez: Lumens Anima

KATIA SANTIBAÑEZ

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KATIA SANTIBAÑEZ Lumens Anima

E S S A Y B Y R E ’A L C H R I S T I A N

D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y

Everywhere and Nowhere , 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 8 2 1⁄ 2 x 79 1⁄ 2 inches

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K AT I A S A N T I B A Ñ E Z : B A C K TO T H E C E N T E R A r t i s a h a r m o n y p a r a l l e l w i t h n a t u r e.

— PA U L C É Z A N N E

K AT I A S A N T I B A Ñ E Z ’ S W O R K D I S P L AY S A P R E O C C U PAT I O N W I T H

ecological consciousness, with understanding the networks of care that naturally manifest in the landscape. These networks often seem decentered or peripheral to human beings, in spite of our own scarcity and strife. “What we can learn from trees,” Santibañez has said, is “how to be responsible for one another, how to care.” Living among a thicket of trees that surround her home in Otis, Massachusetts, Santibañez has found comfort through the landscape, but also a familiar kinship in the interconnectedness of all living things.

Santibañez has spent the past year in Otis — a town that lies on the southern end of the Berkshire Mountains. A reservoir runs along the town’s southeastern corridor, along with portions of the Otis State Forest and the Tolland State Forest, which are situated among wetlands and marshy brooks. Nestled among the lakes and ponds and trees of Otis, Santibañez found her solace in a roadside grove, in a home shared with her husband, fellow artist James Siena.

The windows of her studio frame and delineate the passage of time, capturing the daily, ephemeral shifts of light that ebb and flow throughout the sundrenched room, and the changing landscape as the year progresses and the days become shorter and longer. As fall approaches, the hours of daylight decline and temperatures cool, and the trees undergo a perennial transformation, losing their pigment in brilliant bursts of color. This palette finds its way into Santibañez’s compositions, where golden greens seep and shift into sultry crimsons, yellow ochres, and burnt umbers, while swirls of cerulean and oceanic blues evoke patches of sky peeking through a canopy of leaves on a clear day.

Santibañez traveled to Otis on Friday, March 13, 2020, on what was intended to be a temporary sojourn. She had made this trip many times before, often spending her weekends in Otis before returning to New York. But unlike previous trips, this visit became a long-term retreat, as New York, along with the rest of the country, rapidly shut down on the precipice of COVID-19. During this time, Santibañez was in the process of moving out of her Bronx studio, a veritable Wunderkammer of large-

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The Delight of Solitude , 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 29 3⁄ 4 x 27 1⁄ 2 inches

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Let Me be Lost , 2019. Acrylic on canvas. 30 x 30 inches

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Memories I I , 2020. Acrylic on canvas. 40 x 20 inches

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scale paintings, prints, handmade color swatches, seashells, rocks, dried leaves, and other specimen collected from various travels. Once the artist realized that she would be separated from her materials, her studio, and her home in New York, she initially experienced a wave of panic — the safety of Otis admittedly felt more like a burden than a safe haven.

Settling into this new space, Santibañez found a way to work through her own anxieties surrounding the pandemic. She began to think about her own history of immigration, having arrived in the United States from France in 1990. In the process of immigrating, of taking root in new soil, she felt an innate fear of leaving without the promise of return, a fear that many émigrés are left to face in their nascent state of re-growth.

Growing up in a small hamlet in France, Santibañez has long been attuned to the complex connections between plant and animal life. Ecologist Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree has been a particular source of enlightenment for Santibañez, who initially studied to be a microbiologist. Simard defines how trees are connected through a complex network of resources.

One of the first clues came while I was tapping into the messages that the trees were relaying back and forth through a cryptic underground fungal network. When I followed the clandestine path of the conversations, I learned that this network is pervasive through the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links. A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. 1

As Simard describes, trees interact across species and generations, forming lasting bonds that mutually benefit their natural environments.

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer also writes about the communicative networks that connect fungi and algae, and how the organisms begin to work symbiotically when their habitats no longer provide ideal conditions in which they can prosper.

Scientists are interested in how the marriage of alga and fungus occurs and so they’ve tried to identify the factors that induce the species to live as one… When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can do it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival. 2

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Under the Rising Moon , 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 39 1⁄ 2 x 39 1⁄ 2 inches

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A Recollection I I , 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 45 x 45 inches

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A Recollection , 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 52 x 45 inches

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Santibañez has long considered the implications of environmental care networks within nature. Taking this connection further, it becomes clear that the human body operates along a similar network, where rest, repair, and recovery are fundamentally essential our health. The mutual aid shared among trees stands as potent metaphor for the support structures that we as a society have begun to build and grow out of critical necessity in a tumultuous time. But, Santibañez feels, as life seemingly goes back to normal, we must confront the threat that these structures— our own built environments— are now in danger if we fail to take responsibility for one another.

S I N C E TA K I N G R E F U G E I N O T I S , Santibañez has continued “to explore

the structure of natural elements; the trees and the spiral,” but notes how “the grid has been distorted.”3 With most of her materials in her Bronx studio, she had to initially make do with limited supplies. She was able to scrounge together two scraps of canvas and a few tubes of black, yellow, and white paint—as Santibañez relates, “Picasso said ‘If I don't have red, I use blue.’”4 Two months into quarantine, she began the diptych Another Place (2020) [p. 13]. The golden tesserae conjure medieval stained-glass windows of

Sainte-Chapelle in the artist’s native country, or the mosaics she studied and created during her time at the École des Beaux-Arts. The pieces radiate outward from a pale-yellow light that hovers in the center of each panel. The sharp vertical black bands that run down the composition create order within the complex configuration. The individual shapes are subtly elongated; minute fragments break away from larger forms, like a cell being split and multiplied. Her painting Osmonda (2021) [p. 23] presents a different approach, in which the part seems to replicate the whole, like a kaleidoscope creating a symmetrical synecdoche of a focal image. Other works, like Folding Memories (2021) and Under the Rising

Moon (2019) [p. 9], center on a gap between abstraction and representation. The thicker bands could represent a wood of trees, or the veins of a leaf under a microscope. As the shapes swirl in a play of light and color, the pigments dance with opacity, as their tonality shifts in and out of light and dark. A trick of the eye, the light always seems to be moving, shuffling its way through to the picture plane.

The spiral is a regular motif in Santibañez’s work. Its form is in a constant state of growth and reduction, moving outwards and inwards, disappearing towards a single point and proliferating through it in a simultaneous

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Another Place , 2020. Acrylic on canvas. 42 x 42 inches

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action. This constant state of progression and regression is, for the artist, symbolic of the human condition— our existence, our experiences are not linear, but interconnected points on a revolving spectrum, always in close contact, and always moving. Recent works that incorporate the spiral do so to different ends. By Midnight (2019) [p. 15], for instance, subtly recalls eighteenth-century rocaille , a method of design inspired by symmetrical structures in nature. The radiating beads could evoke small pebbles as easily as the ridges of a conch shell, while the colors emulate the sky at sunset. Let Purple Be (2018 –19) places two spirals side by side rotating in opposite directions; they clash into one another along an invisible border, suggesting a violent disruption. Similarly, in A Secret Field (2019) [ p. 21] , the jagged ultramarine edges of the spiral disappear into a vanishing point, like a calm horizon hovering in the distance of a tempestuous sea.

A tempest, a spiral, a shattered grid — for Santibañez, these motifs symbolize states of unrest, both internal and external. They embody her own process of coming to terms with our collective disharmony— with nature, with ourselves, and with one another. Among trees and their collective networks, the artist finds not only a sense of connection, but also solidarity. Through these networks of care, we find our way, in Santibañez’s words, “back to the center.”

R E ’A L C H R I S T I A N

1 . Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree:

3 . Santibañez quoted in “From the Studio:

Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (New

Katia Santibañez” DC Moore Gallery, April 30,

York: Knopf , 2021) , pg #?

2020, www.dcmooregallery.com/news-events/

from-the-studio-katia-santibanez.

2 . Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass:

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge,

4 . Author in conversation with the artist,

and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis:

July 2021.

Milkweed Editions , 2013), 272.

R E ’A L C H R I S T I A N

is a Queens-based writer, editor, curator, and art historian.

Her work has been featured in Art in America , The Brooklyn Rail , Art in Print , BOM B Magazine , and ART PAPE RS , where she is a contributing editor. Her

essays have appeared in catalogues including The Black Index (Hunter College Art Galleries & Hirmer Verlag, 2021); Zipora Fried (Sikkema Jenkins & C o ., 2021); and Myeongsoo Kim: Mother-Land (CUE Art Foundation , 2020). She is a graduate curatorial fellow at the Hunter College Art Galleries, and the Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

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By Midnight , 2019. Acrylic on canvas. 39 1⁄ 2 x 39 1⁄ 2 inches

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Interlude , 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 811⁄ 2 x 71 inches

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Variation XXI , 2020. Acrylic on canvas. 18 x 20 inches

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Variation XXiI , 2020. Acrylic on canvas. 20 x 18 inches

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A Secret Field , 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 51 x 51 inches

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The grid is similar to a weft ... I invite the viewer to walk inside the structures, like a garden they can traverse with their mind, leaving the choice to start where they want.

— K AT I A S A N T I B A Ñ E Z

K AT I A S A N T I B A Ñ E Z ’ S W O R K

teems with life and utilizes grid structures

to examine the intricacies and minutiae of organic forms. Beginning with a grid, she approaches the canvas precisely and allows every inch to have its own expressive quality. She examines how objects of nature can be structured to magnify a canvas. Layers of sharp, kaleidoscopic patterns come together to create hypnotic, yet tranquil abstract canvases that urge for a prolonged viewing and contemplation. There is a vibrancy reflected through the order and the meticulous layers transform, through color, into something deep and mesmerizing. Bringing light to her paintings has become essential, and the slight perceptible changes in pigmentation and tones on the surface create an impression of a glow diffusing across the canvas. A mixture of a rigid formal base with the swirling swaths of color leads to a contemplation of each component as its own entity while simultaneously absorbing how they come together as a whole.

Katia Santibañez was born in France. She studied painting at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts. She has been in residencies at Yaddo , NY; Casa Wabi, Mexico; The Albers Foundation , CT; Sitka , OR; and Civitella Ranieri, Italy. Her work has been collected internationally and is in both private and public collections including The AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, Buffalo , NY; The Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, France; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum , MA; The Morgan Library and Museum; The Museum of Modern Art; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York , NY.

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Osmonda , 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 47 1⁄ 4 x 47 1⁄ 2 inches

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition Katia Santibañez : Lumens Anima DC Moore Gallery, September 9 – October 9

© DC Moore Gallery, 2021

isbn: 978 - 0- 9 9 9 316 7- 4- 0

cover: The Delight of Solitude , 2020 ( detail ) Acrylic on canvas. 29 3⁄ 4 x 27 1⁄ 2 inches

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D C M O O R E G A L L E RY