Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to present Journey of a Solitary Painter, an exhibition of recent works on paper and paintings by Katia Santibañez. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.
The title of the exhibition is taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s unfinished autobiographical novel: Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1776). Rousseau’s work is centered on the author’s pursuit of finding freedom and happiness in a world outside of society - with its stifling rules and value systems. Similar to Rousseau’s solitary walks, Santibañez finds immense solace in her private studio practice. It is in the act of creating that she is able to connect and interact on a personal level with the natural world around her.
Drawing on micro and macro elements of her natural surroundings: leaves, twigs, branches, forests, ice, snow, mountains etc., Santibañez creates unique systems, often based on a grid, that are at once meditations on nature as well as personal interpretations of the language of minimalist non-representational painting. Her color palette is usually limited to a few colors in a single painting and the result is arresting - as the graphic nature of her line pops with crispness. Conversely, in her drawings, Santibañez will use a variety of pencil weights, giving her works on paper a range of subtleties as if “brushed by a moth’s wings”.
