Armig Santos & Kiván Quiñones

Ambar Quijano presents Llegó a mi Alma, Surgió en Mi Memoria by artists Armig Santos and Kiván Quiñones. During Art Week, the gallery will have extended hours from 10 am to 9 pm.

Armig Santos’ contemplative Caribbean landscapes converse with Kiván Quiñones’ found object sculptures in LLEGÓ A MI ALMA, SURGIÓ EN MI MEMORIA; transporting the viewer into a territory rife with emotion and impregnated with memory. Quietly pensive and yet charged with powerful socio-political commentary, Santos and Quiñones share an interest in piecing together a particular understanding of the island where they grew up and currently live through their works. Exploring history and its relationship to collective memory, objecthood, representation, and the inevitable intermingling of past and present, they offer a view of Puerto Rico from the inside out.

Full of reverence for the natural world, Santos’ gestural and expressive paintings combine the landscapes of Puerto Rico with an exploration of its obscured histories as well as the reality of life on the island. On a similar note, Quiñones’ exploration centers around analyzing history and contrasting it to memory. While investigating various aspects of the ancestral cultures that inform his identity, Quiñones attempts to bridge past and present by creating forms that juxtapose historic artifacts with elements of contemporary reality. Fostering a dialogue that reconnects us with the forgotten, abandoned, or what can be understood as the historic debris of memory, his sculptures allow imagination to take flight —thus fusing the recognizable and unrecognizable. The seashell phones acting as communication devices at the service of the intuitive knowledge that constantly emerges from within.

A song from the sea seems to reverberate throughout the gallery, with Santos’ paintings looking outwards onto sublime Caribbean landscapes or inwards towards specific moments from the island’s history; while Quiñones’ sculptures highlight the significance or meaning of particular objects, tracing their echo in the present. Insular and expansive, Santos’ paintings are both local and universal, with German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich or French artist Pierre Bonnard sharing equal weight among his references to that of Puerto Rican painter Rafael Ferrer or local composer Ismael Rivera. Similarly, Quiñones mines the cultural archive of his ancestors whilst looking to Post-Modern artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol as models for the critical appropriation of imagery, or at André Breton and others in terms of formulating and presenting seemingly surreal objects.

Connected to Puerto Rico via art, poetry and music, Santos and Quiñones voyeuristically look at existence on the island through their works. Making a study of Puertorican artistic production and taking into account the history of art —which inevitably includes European depictions of the Caribbean as Other— they reappropriate the tools of image-making and come up with a local understanding of history, memory and place. Thus subverting the narratives imposed on the island and seeking to empower the residents of Puerto Rico and beyond. Sourced from Ismael Rivera’s song ‘Si Te Contara’, the exhibition’s title encapsulates their relationship with the sea —one that activates past experiences, pushes forward creation, connects them to a collective consciousness, and translates into a deep desire to deepen into the mystery of living surrounded by water, which is both guardian and menace. A body of water that washes away whilst simultaneously acting as a receptacle of memory.

— Ambar Quijano