Santiago Cuen Hernandez

Lives and works in Guanajuato, Mexico

Artist statement

Artist Statement Painting is, for me, a space for freedom, introspection, and personal development. While I work, time seems to expand, and the experience of making becomes as important as the result. I am interested in the challenge of bringing an imagined image into matter, while remaining attentive to possibilities that emerge during the process and that I could not have anticipated. My work develops through the tension between intention and discovery, control and accident. I do not want chance to determine the work, but neither do I want to impose a completely predetermined image upon it. I am interested in the moment when something unexpected forces me to look again, recognize new relationships, and reconsider an initial intention. Painting becomes a dialogue between what I intend to make and what the image allows me to discover. Representation, for me, is not limited to reproducing what already exists in the physical world. Through color, form, space, and figuration, I seek to materialize images capable of containing ideas, emotions, and internal states. Technical experience is fundamental to this process because it allows accident to become intention: to decide what to preserve, what to transform, and where an image should go. I also want the work to function as a space for projection. Rather than determining a single interpretation, I seek to create images in which viewers can encounter something of their own experience. Beauty plays an important role in this...

Artwork