Santiago Ayán

Spain

Granada, 1963 - 2010.

Santiago Ayán was an artist with a great vital and artistic journey that reflected in his work his existential reflections, his acute critical understanding of reality with a language that derived from neo-expressionism to a conceptual stance that integrated materials from different cultures under a motto, a declaration of intent with which he sealed a large part of his production: RSE (Radio Sintonía Exterior): "We broadcast when we feel like it."

In his early works, he dominated a figuration marked by tension in composition and color, by the revelation of anguish and erotic charge. The symbolic value of color lived on in pieces of highly varied plasticity in which the gesture of pictorial writing, the vehicle of his existential thought, was key.

His later work is marked by the mystique of the intimate, of the autobiographical through a religious iconography, which dealt with a scathing sense of humor and through drawings of great symbolic power associated with photographs of his body in attitudes allusive to denial. , prostration or seclusion. Later, he approached popular culture out of a desire for cross-cultural experience and representation from materials collected from symbolic objects that led to a production with a current discourse and of special critical relevance, in which disenchantment had already made nick. The center of his work has always been occupied by existential themes: life, love, pain, sex, death.