Santiago Ydañez was born in Jaén, 1967. Lives and works in Berlín and Granada (Spain). Graduated in Painting from the School of Arts of Universidad of Granada, Ydañez is one of the most internationally recognized Spanish artists of his generation. Santiago Ydañez  was awarded the Premio de Pintura ABC in 2002, Premio de Pintura Generación 2002 - Caja Madrid, Beca del Colegio de España in París - Ministerio de Cultura in 2001 and the Beca de la Fundación Marcelino Botín in 1998. Ydañez work is represented in several Institutional Art collections such as:  Fundación Botín (Santander), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museo Sofía Imber (Caracas, Venezuela), amongst others. He’s work is also represented in private colections in Mexico, Canada, Italy, Norway, Germany, Portugal and Spain.

For a long time we were told that art had a birth and a death. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) "invented" that corpus we still call "history of art" using a mixture of ruins and remains. In The Garden of the Delights (2017) painted by the Spanish painter Santiago Ydañez at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, the crestfallen face of a girl is trimmed over the frescoes of Villa Livia in Rome. The immense sadness that oozes her gaze in the foreground could be that of Winckelmann himself, whose doctrine is born of a feeling of melancholy for the loss of an ideal past, the lost of paradise. Precisely his work The History of art in Antiquity (1764) begins with the mourning for a dead art: the ancient art. And the desire for its return that makes the imitation of the ancients the only possibility we have left to return to "being great."However, that history of ideal and aesthetic art has been disturbed throughout the twentieth century. Aby Warburg (1866–1929) dealt one of the first fatal blows to that ideal art history by replacing the model based on the biological temporal stages of life and death. In exchange, he proposes another "ghostly" model of the history of images in which images are expressed by survival, reminiscence and not by academic transmission. The girl from Ydañez's Garden of Delights is one of the many layers of Ydañez's hybrid work, in which we recognize the stratum of German expressionist painting, the recent history of Germany and its complex identity, in coexistence with other strata like the original Italian painting. Thus, we could "read" the work of Ydañez as his particular Atlas Mnemosine or the map of an archaeological find woven by unexpected and obsessive returns.

Ydañez tastes the soup of eels (aalsuppenstil) with which Aby Warburg compared its own tangled, complex and unfinished way of work. These eels coil together like the deadly snakes on the body of Laocoon and his children that illustrates both beauty and tragedy. Apollo and Dionysus. For Warburg, the history of Western civilizations is traversed by this polarity. Impossible to contemplate the nudes painted by Ydañez in his "intervened boxes" as an ideal form of art. Impossible to ignore the tensions that shake the entrails of his images. Impossible to isolate them from the threat that looms over the flesh of those bodies that share space with sharp knives and axes of the nineteenth century. Eros (beauty) knows his deadly destiny (Thanatos). To dissect is to open. To open means to tear but also to create possibilities. Ydañez's painting is an open painting of possibilities, which deconstructs the disciplinary boundaries of the image and turns the history of art into a total archeological phenomenon where the traces of the paganism, the religious and the scientific converge. It is an obsessive painting, built of vestiges and survivals. Undoubtedly, and after so many announced deaths, the greatest survival is the art of painting itself that relives again and again under the speedy brush of Santiago Ydañez.

Santiago Ydañez: Painting as Archeology

Text and curated by Susana Sanz

Dissect the History of Art

For a long time we were told that art had a birth and a death. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) "invented" that corpus we still call "history of art" using a mixture of ruins and remains. In The Garden of the Delights (2017) painted by the Spanish painter Santiago Ydañez (Puente de Geneve, Jaén, 1967) at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, the crestfallen face of a girl is trimmed over the frescoes of Villa Livia in Rome. The immense sadness that oozes her gaze in the foreground could be that of Winckelmann himself, whose doctrine is born of a feeling of melancholy for the loss of an ideal past, the lost of paradise. Precisely his work The History of art in Antiquity (1764) begins with the mourning for a dead art: the ancient art. And the desire for its return that makes the imitation of the ancients the only possibility we have left to return to "being great."

However, that history of ideal and aesthetic art has been disturbed throughout the twentieth century. Aby Warburg (1866–1929) dealt one of the first fatal blows to that ideal art history by replacing the model based on the biological temporal stages of life and death. In exchange, he proposes another "ghostly" model of the history of images in which images are expressed by survival, reminiscence and not by academic transmission. The girl from Ydañez's Garden of Delights is one of the many layers of Ydañez's hybrid work, in which we recognize the stratum of German expressionist painting, the recent history of Germany and its complex identity, in coexistence with other strata like the original Italian painting. Thus, we could "read" the work of Ydañez as his particular Atlas Mnemosine or the map of an archaeological find woven by unexpected and obsessive returns.

Dissect the artist

On a trip to the mountains in the south of Spain, Santiago Ydañez stopped the car and was photographed as Narcissus on the snow, peering into a black water that did not return his reflection. As in other self-portraits, the painter had his face covered with shaving foam or white paint as if he wanted to transform himself into a painting. Or rather create a mask of painting like those of the portraits from Al Fayum’s mummies. The face and the mask, nature and artifice. This binomial perfectly explains the creative universe of the painter from his childhood, painting birds in his village and studying them through books and dissected birds. Being an altar boy in the church of Puente de Geneve, the sculptures of the saints and especially the watery glass eyes of the virgins on the altars reminded him the deer or bull heads that still decorate many houses and popular bars in Spain. His painting is completely splatter to the religious and natural environment of the South of Spain that has always fascinated him, and his keen eye that accumulates a large repertoire of images of the history of art.

Ydañez tastes the soup of eels (aalsuppenstil) with which Aby Warburg compared its own tangled, complex and unfinished way of work. These eels coil together like the deadly snakes on the body of Laocoon and his children that illustrates both beauty and tragedy. Apollo and Dionysus. For Warburg, the history of Western civilizations is traversed by this polarity. Impossible to contemplate the nudes painted by Ydañez in his "intervened boxes" as an ideal form of art. Impossible to ignore the tensions that shake the entrails of his images. Impossible to isolate them from the threat that looms over the flesh of those bodies that share space with sharp knives and axes of the nineteenth century. Eros (beauty) knows his deadly destiny (Thanatos).

Dissect the painting

Numerous works of the history of the images are crossed by the polarity Eros-Thanatos. In Caravaggio's The Crucifixion of St. Peter (1601), the saint is reduced to a semi-naked body prepared to die but at the same time his flesh is sensual and muscular. In the interpretation of the work of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome painted by Ydañez as a triptych, San Pedro appears sacrificed with a sharp, repeated and therefore sadistic violence, as if it were a film sequence or a spectrum that  multiplies its image in front of us. In this eternal cruelty, we observe the metamorphosis of the canvas itself, which turns its empty spaces into full ones, the whites and blacks of charcoal drawing into color. To witness a last metamorphosis only suggested, which will turn the body of the saint, after his sacrifice, into a spoil of flesh.

Beneath that beautiful skin of St. Peter are the viscera and putrefaction that remind us of their tragic destiny. Alberti was already talked about painting a naked body from the bones; as in an anatomical flayed figure in which harmony, beauty and horror coexist. Not in vain, we discover the interest of Ydañez to dissect the human and animals bodies through his painting, as if he were a taxidermist with brushes. The work of Ydañez is a kind of taxidermy that works from the inside to outside and vice versa; Discovering and coating the vacuum over and over again through superimposed layers on the canvas. Again, the idea of the archaeological stratum is made visible in his painting, as in an obsession to skin the superfluous skins of the painting and get to gut the interior of it.

This exercise of pictorial dissection leads him to fragment the representation of the woman's body, from the exterior to the interior. Firstly painting the torso or pubis in an individualized way, without allowing the viewer to look away or to block the desire through idealization as Winckelmann would have done. For Georges Bataille, nudity is a process in itself that is used as a shift towards desire and opens our psychic world. And secondly, the anatomical dissection of the interior of the female body is a theme that Ydañez repeats throughout his career inspired by the Venus of the Italian modeller Clemente Susini.

To dissect is to open. To open means to tear but also to create possibilities. Ydañez's painting is an open painting of possibilities, which deconstructs the disciplinary boundaries of the image and turns the history of art into a total anthropological phenomenon where the traces of the paganism, the religious and the scientific converge. It is an obsessive painting, built of vestiges and survivals. Undoubtedly, and after so many announced deaths, the greatest survival is the art of painting itself that relives again and again under the speedy brush of Santiago Ydañez.