The Egg & Dart is excited to bring Nick Santoro to 2022 edition of Melbourne Art Fair. Find us at Booth K7.
Nick Santoro’s work explores an ad hoc parallel between a tangled stream of mediated imagery and the shifting status of things on the street. His absurdist genre paintings offer a populated grab bag where outcasts and winners launch into speculative encounters in an atmospheric dimension between the local and the global. The approach is irreverent while giving symbolic weight to elements like a specific technology, a message on a T-shirt or a brand of shoe. Memory drawing, screenshots from his phone and an awareness of proto-Renaissance composition inform the work. Human figures and animals are elevated through outlines to acquire an aura of celebrity or transcendence. The ground plane lifts up like a stage while glowing skies offer an infinite backdrop.
The painted artist frames establish these paintings as objects that then extend out to include real structural elements like plumbing pipes, cyclone fencing and sculpted hands. The installation proposes a recombinant order to things by piecing together bits of piping as a make-do version of construction. In the other dimension, his drawings strip away colour to develop a richly textural, linear detail. While Santoro’s studio and digital archive offer a collage of reference points and diversions, there are no didactic politics to be found. The work is a data set of pop culture flung up to see what elements find orbit and what then falls back down to earth.
Nick Santoro was a finalist in the Archibald Prize in 2020 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 significant installation formed part of Here + Now at the Wollongong Art Gallery near the end of 2018 and his work is held in the Wollongong Art Gallery collection. Nick Santoro was born in 1994 and lives in the Illawarra area.
Melody Willis
