Turner, Grady, T., "Santi Moix: Paul Kasmin," Artnews , January 1999. One could easily be seduced by the sensuousness of Santi Moix's quasi-abstract paintings in this show. Large or small, they pack a wallop with their luxuriant brush strokes and unapologetic beauty. It is also possible to be seduced by the biography of this young Catalan. Orphaned when a flood wiped out a gypsy encampment, he was adopted by a doctor who insisted the child prodigy become a painter. Moix covers his canvases with cerulean blue, applied with energetic slashes of white. Shapes resembling fruits or body parts cluster in groups, congregating in the upper regions of smaller canvases or stretching across larger canvases to suggest islands on the horizon. Above and below, there is only the azure sky and sea.Painted with loaded brushes, these organic shapes recall many things - mud, entrails, soil, feces - without being too specific, except in the case of some recurring cartoon eyes. Extending across the middle of the mammoth Untitled (Osaka) , Moix's loose shapes are linked as if they grew from one another. Clouds droop like pendulous breasts from the top edge of the canvas. A weighty form composed of blobs hangs among the clouds as if ready to fall like a raindrop. Below, eyes peer in every direction. Ocular shapes also predominate in Moix's smaller canvases, but the forms tend to clump together in the upper reaches of the compositions. A cluster descends from the top of Fallen from the Sky, languidly floating above a cliff toward a phallic tower. In Fotopsia, the blobs seem to mutate and grow over one another as an eye scans the blue below, as if searching for a place to land this vast body. Moix's brush seems to be searching as well, moving through painterly smears and swirls, confident that the journey is an end in itself. |