Santi Moix. Brooklyn Studio

M77 Gallery is pleased to present an event dedicated to Santi Moix, one of the New York art scene’s most interesting characters. Set up in collaboration with Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, the Brooklyn Studio exhibition features 40 previously unseen artworks, including paintings and watercolours, and a large site specific installation, especially designed for the gallery spaces. Catalan by birth (Barcelona, 1960), Santi Moix drew the lifeblood to nurture his creativity from his frequent travels. Influenced by masters like Delacroix, Velazquez, El Greco, Picasso, Mirò Pollock and Mutzuo Takahashi, a mysterious Japanese painter who befriended him when he was living in the Orient, Moix had and continues to have an equally important source of inspiration from the world of literature. Literary imagination is truly an important store of information for his painting. Moix achieved truly important recognition in 2013 when he was asked to paint an enormous mural for the Prada store, designed by Rem Koohlas in Soho, a job that brought together various techniques and languages and which is the summa of his aesthetic approach to large scale work. “What I attempt to do, every day”, says Santi Moix, «is rebel against the past and codes, so that you don’t understand my work on first seeing it, and I try to get the work to be intelligent in itself.I like paintings that seem idiotic. Struggling against the instincts that lead to certain automatisms, I like to think that the leafy forests are huge ears. I think of Ramon LLull (a writer and philosopher from Majorca) who said: always capture ideas in the ambience and project them until they turn into real substance. We come from a big bang, the idea that this very explosion will explode on the canvas and be lost forever. What I do, as an artist, is freeze that instant».