In May of 2008, Colombian artist Santiago Betancur, left his birthplace of Medellin, Colombia, and settled in Miami's flourishing Wynwood Art District. The cultural adjustments and language barrier wore thin the artist's initial excitement for his new home.

Feelings of isolation and hopelessness began to dominate Betancur's life, and, naturally, seeped into his work. Using a mixture of acrylic paint and pure water, Betancur worked on life-size figure paintings that can only be described as a synthesis between Da Vinci's anatomical sketches, Goya's Black Paintings, and of course, the undefined substance of Betancur himself. The artist adorned canvases with the embodiments of his despair-dark, skinless figures, dripping with blood and shreds of a human soul. Grotesque, graceful and strong.

Arms stretched out behind him, his chest stands strong against the winds of change. Icarus spreading his wings for the first time, but this man has no need for wings as he assumes the pose of freedom. With the conviction that liberation of his spirit is now in his own hands, feathers and wingspan are obsolete.

Betancur's new work speaks of a man who, through his personal struggle, has connected to something much greater than himself, and, most importantly, he shares it in a way more compelling than words can relay. His experience and evolution become the viewer's own as one allows the spirit of existentialism connect to an innate desire for freedom, flight, and communion with the higher self.

The success of his exhibitions lies in the artist's natural capacity to disrupt the viewer's sensibility with one line, one mind-bending stroke, taking an experience from his personal unconscious directly into the collective unconscious of the human experience.

Anna Visnitskaya, Krasa Fine Art

CONTACT:

www.area23artgallery.com
                                santibetancur@gmail.com
                                +1(786) 718 3862