Santiago Picatoste’s exhibition, Mapped, is the closing show of Garna Art Gallery’s 2021 exhibition cycle. We are also pleased to present Picatoste’s first solo show in Madrid in five years, in which the artist presents a new series of canvases conceived expressly for the gallery space.  

Mapped, which will open to the public on December 1, addresses a new project by Picatoste, in which the artist launches an exclusive, never-before-seen series comprised of a dozen large-format canvases. As we approach the pieces we discover abstract forms that are actually visual constructions of aerial views or undefined land masses, which confer unreal nuances to the representation of the world. The artist interprets these architectural constructions as a bird’s eye view of a world in constant evolution. Abstractions that intend to show a «frozen» pictorial gesture, like a photogram on the surface.  

Giving continuity to the research on the pictorial gesture that the artist has been carrying out since the beginning of his career, the last years of the artist’s work are marked by a more alchemical way of investigating and producing his work. In this way, the exhibition incorporates works of great formal richness and allegorical complexity, inspired by a more sophisticated urban language, as well as visual references to the culture of comics and graffiti that corroborate the importance of abstraction to understand the world we inhabit, as well as the artist’s position of relevance among the most outstanding creators of the moment. 

The visual language thus evokes a multiplicity of narratives that bring to mind images of a world in movement and a universe that in turn is a tribute to and connects us with the subjectivist spirit of that New York school that made a painting an event in itself.