The extensive exhibition that the Fundació Vila Casas dedicates to the work of Santi Moix (Barcelona, ??1960) is being described as the first retrospective or anthological. However, he himself rejects that category, although he affirms that “it is good that it is done, these are things that have to happen, and I am happy, and Enrique Juncosa, the curator, has been exquisitely perceptive.”
He prefers to say that, with the exhibition at Espais VolArt, he closes the parenthesis that has been the period that marks the title: “I have already done what I could and had to do with painting, sculpture and ceramics, and it has served a lot. But now it is time to reflect to see what is going to come and how it is going to develop ”. You need to anticipate to imagine what the next flowering or explosion of artificial castles will be like: “which will not be different either, in the end I always do the same, without moving away from Nature, from the place where I belong.”
For this predictive exercise, which is common in his creative process, he returns to the essence of drawing, to black and white, in search of the new language, or the new code. Now, he is obsessively dedicated to some drawings on the island of Menorca made from different observation points and which can be seen later in Barcelona. He says that he draws as he writes, to reflect, and quotes Klee to ensure that drawing and literature have the same background.
Moix has experienced drawing as a refuge since childhood. In the same way, he returns to the tranquility of Pallars Sobirà or downtrodden Barcelona -where he has also established a studio- from New York City, where he has lived since 1986, “because the big feet of Miró’s peasant, who settles her well on her land, I need to know where I am from”.
Travel is a constant for him. Moving and going far away always helps to get to know what is close to us better. His work has been exhibited more frequently in the United States or Japan than in Spain. Upon returning to Barcelona, ??he cannot help but feel like a painter “more American than Spanish”, in terms of “efficiency, the execution of ideas and trying not to complain”, given the disinterest of the artists here in what they do others or the general contempt he believes for drawing and painting: “in the United States, gallery owners don’t care about the media you use, if they are in fashion or not, what interests them is if they can do something to defend you and help you to develop your work”. A decisive impulse for him was that of the gallery owner and friend of his Paul Kasmin, who died in 2020, and who encouraged him: “be weird, stay weird.”
Equally decisive was the lot of paper they gave him at Pace Gallery, as a recent arrival, to show what he knew how to do. From there came dreamlike forms, over or under water, survivors of storms and floods, just as he and his two brothers survived the floods in Vallès in 1962 in which his parents died. But that happened in another life, or so they have told him. Santi Moix was born again and had another family and another childhood.
And the opportunities offered by Fortune continued, which she has tried not to miss: with the money from the first paintings she sold she went to New York, in 2002 she received the precious Guggenheim scholarship and between 2015 and 2018 she carried out her overwhelming intervention in the Romanesque church of Sant Víctor de Saurí, in Pallars Sobirà, consecrating its world of flowers and fireworks. The exuberance of dreams and imagination enveloping the solitary silence of meditation: “for me it was a very important project, but above all because I wanted people to feel uplifted when they walked in,” she says.
Among the real and invented beings that fill the walls of the temple, there is no shortage of the omnipresent mosquitoes, of which he assures that “they are a self-portrait.” Animals that fascinate and annoy him in equal measure, that he imagined or dreamed of on a night of storm and flood flying and buzzing above people, waking them so they would not be swept away by the flood current. That is exactly what he would like to achieve with his work.
His work calls for close observation, with the calm of a donkey loaded with junk that offers us the image of his rump because he is about to leave after seeing what is necessary. The artist has also been portrayed there, always on the verge of disappearing and becoming abstracted like Huckleberry Finn did, the solitary character created by Mark Twain in whom he has found a friend and faithful reflection: “we are both Moses, two outsiders who they have imposed the precariousness of their origins, forced to reinvent themselves so as not to be swallowed up by uniformity, always leaving an open window through which to escape”.
Santi Moix The coast of mosquitoes. An anthology (1998-2022).
Curated by Enrique Juncosa. Vila Casas Espais VolART Foundation. www.fundaciovilacasas.com. From February 21 to July 16