TEXTILE MEETS TACTILE

There may very well be a magic carpet on Walker street.

Antonio Santín, Puente de Plata, 2024, Oil on canvas, 63 × 86 5/8 in, Image courtesy of Marc Straus

Antonio Santín’s Puente de Plata is an exhibition comprising large scale canvas paintings of ornate carpets folding in on themselves. These bodacious works on canvas beckon to the passerby and demand their attention.

Detail image of Puente de Plata

This is trompe l’oeil to the nth degree. The effect is achieved through a command of shadow but also of paint as an object. Like the women that used needle and thread to weave the carpets of yesteryear together, Santín uses micro compressors and needles to apply thick oil paint to his canvas to create the illusion of woven thread. When he began his carpet painting journey, Santín painted from life. However, he ultimately found that the carpets he could find did not satisfy his complex aesthetic interest. Now painting from his imagination, Santín creates labyrinthine designs that pull from traditional styles. Uniform in their precision but unique in composition, the expertly tangled floral accents are an excellent example of the contemporized Herati, Gul, and other Middle Eastern or Indian carpet motifs. The thickly piped lines of white, blue, pink and green remind me of the saccharine cakes that sit in the windows of bakeries on Mott street. The illusion ripples and (sorry) squirts across the canvas in hypnotic plaits and contusions that will make you trombone your neck until the gallery attendant looks at you funny.