Santiago Gasquet,
1978, Buenos Aires
My work shifts from painting and video to performance and drawing, this last one gathers most of my job. I’m interested in various elements that are present in collective thinking such as fear, pop music, psychotropic plants or biased typography of the mass media as resources to narrate social issues of my time and my immediate context. Sometimes I approach the autobiographical to narrate from an intimate and personal perspective, problems, fears and uncertainty, and I find in the act of exhibiting-sharing the pieces a kind of group therapy. Then I can film a video in which I comb my father’s hair, days before he dies, for a long time, a time that seems eternal, or draw a self-portrait of my head smashed against the floor, or I can also paint existential questions in the first person using Google’s font and colours. Likewise, I’m interested in bringing to the present and reformulating in my work numerous iconic representations from art history, as well as thinking about possible future scenarios in which I imagine, for example, a planet where only traces of humanity remain. In all this game of words that try to explain something is where I discover contradictions and I stop myself to observe and think about; next, I ask myself: Will humanity be a good option for this world?
BIO / CV ↯
Santiago Gasquet (b. 1978, Buenos Aires – Argentina) studied teaching at the Lola Mora National School of Fine Arts and later studied engraving and sculpture at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine
Arts. In 2012 he attended the Artists Program of the Torcuato Di
Tella University, and in 2013 he was a fellow of the Center for Artistic Research (CIA). In 2017 he received a full scholarship from the National Fund for the Arts to carry out a two-month residency at MATADERO Madrid, part of the Argentina program as a guest country at ARCO, and in 2018 he carried out a residency at the EAC (Montevideo, Uruguay). He made the solo exhibitions “El beat del momento” (Ungallery, 2018- 2019), “Dónde estoy?” (Museo de Bellas Artes, La Plata), “Qué hago aquí?” (PIEDRAS, 2018) “Ahora” (Metrónomo, Buenos Aires) y “La captura del alma” (Isla Flotante, 2013). In 2013 he exhibits the site- specific drawing “I MISS YOU” at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. His work was exhibited at Matadero (Madrid), Museo De Arte Contemporáneo de Salta (Salta), Casa Nacional del Bicentenario (Buenos Aires), María Casado Home Gallery (Beccar), Rusia Galería (Tucumán), Palais de Glace (Buenos Aires), Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Buenos Aires) and Espacio Forest (Buenos Aires) among others.
