NYAB Event - Santiago Caruso "ARS OBSCURA: Terror y Miseria"

Santiago Caruso "ARS OBSCURA: Terror y Miseria"

Last Rites Gallery

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"ARS OBSCURA: Terror y Miseria," will be Caruso's first exhibition at the gallery and will include paintings from three series: "Superstition and Inquisition", "Revealers, Prophets & Liars" and "Profound Shadow From the Past" that have never before been exhibited in the United States. Caruso's works are of a time and place of both the past and present; a world not unlike our own -- where the physical embodiment of demons and hellions roam the earth and overturn the religious, commonplace and basic tenets of society for a world overrun with magic, terrors, witches and other beasts. Caruso's poetic, macabre, yet foretelling world is laden with mythological symbols and relative imagery, illuminating the other side of common axioms stressed by society and religion that harness culture and, theoretically, preserve and sustain both mankind and a functioning civilization. Perhaps Caruso is shedding light on the demons that, although appear to be suppressed by humanity and its tenets, still exist and inevitably run rampant in mankind.

"This gallery of horror archetypes or phantasmagories to come, proposes a pilgrimage under the gaze of archaic deities: the viewer must deal with false prophets, demons and hungry ghosts, attend to dark aquelarres, bearing the erosion of time.

Everything is a metaphor of man subjected to the forces of nature, his own fears, his profound ignorance and stupidity. But it is also, the artist's intention to revindicate miserables, segregated by the higher powers, who as senile demiurges that eventually recover their will, may transform the world forever with redeeming or damning gesture." -- Santiago Caruso

Caruso's artistic prowess and content are influenced by the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Schwob, German Expressionism cinema as well as the artwork of Odilon Redon, Frantisek Kupka, Gustave Moreau, Max Klinger, James Ensor and Mikhail Vrubel. The gothic narratives present in ARS OBSCURA: Terror y Miseria are executed uniquely in the artist's manipulation of watercolor, ink, tempera and the physical scratching of the medium, which effectively strengthens the foreboding and morbid nature of his works.