Nick Santoro’s universe might be a strategy for figuring out the dimensions of capitalism. In an offhand way, the expression Libidinal Hymnal certainly suggests that. And it is a state the late punk thinker Mark Fisher proposed as a kind of entrapment: a political model that leaves little room to dream beyond its own consumptive desires. Acquisition and personal expression might be paramount, but it’s pretty fun right? And Santoro offers us a populated grab bag where outcasts and winners launch into speculative encounters in a slippery dimension between local realism and the internet realm. (For example, TESLA’s cybertruck confronts the Bindle Bros in a George Soros network of grey pipes located in youtube’s blind spots.)
The artist doesn’t talk this way though. His associations are easy permutations, not quite this-goes-with-that, but a hypothetical practice where the works propose open-ended scenarios. The space of the painting suggests a theatre stage with the artist presenting as producer/director. The decorative frames might even act as a definitive curtain. One significant work, a cut out of the artist’s profile, is a nod to this role as “producer”, a piss-take acknowledgement of the figurative painter as a puppet master.
While Santoro’s studio and computer offer a collage of reference points and diversions, there are no didactic politics to be found. Santoro does mention the documentary Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis’s densely delivered analysis of the global political landscape from the 1980s onward. But it could be that the artist aligns himself with the jumpy editing and pushed together aesthetic of this film, which guides us from Jane Fonda workouts via Ronald Reagan’s astrological decision making to the billionaire factories of the present.
A more clearly political element in the current show is Santoro’s workplace drawings. These have been constructed while working at a front desk, doing the kind of part-time monitoring job that allows for an art practice. Here drawing has become a parallel kind of labour embedded within that which is paid by the hour. In Santoro’s drawings there is the same detail as seen in the paintings but stripping away colour and surface allows for a richer linear expression. This linearity has then found its way back into recent paintings, where figures are elevated through outline, acquiring an aura of celebrity or transcendence.
Nick Santoro was this year a finalist in the Archibald Prize with his painting of fellow artist Phanos Proestos. The painting “Hewitts Avenue Montage” was exhibited in the John Sulman Prize in 2019 and his work was presented at Melbourne Art Fair 2020 and Sydney Contemporary in 2019. A recent significant installation formed part of Here + Now at the Wollongong Art Gallery near the end of 2018. Santoro was born in 1994 and lives in the Illawarra area.
-Melody Willis
