Antimundo (2023)

Oscar Santillán, Medulla lit by several suns, 2024, Oil on canvas, 190 x 126 cm Courtesy: Copperfield, London 

Oscar Santillán, Antimundo 00U, 2023, Oil on canvas, 120 x 85 cm. Courtesy: Collectie Jeroen Princen and Copperfield, London

The images in the Antimundo series are in tension with normative categories and normative representations of the ‘natural’ – a notion that we have inherited from Western scientists and explorers, and more specially from Linnaeus who in the 18th century set forth, in his Systema Naturae, an all encompassing classification for everything on Earth. 

The paintings in the Antimundo series emerge from images generated by a combination of the artist hand-drawings, neural networks specifically trained from an image archive that the artist has been gathering for many years, and digital 3D rendering. In order to generate further friction with the tradition of how ‘nature’ has been represented by normative Western worldviews, Santillán translates the resulting digital imagery into oil paintings: the very medium most often used for such representations. By doing so, the Antimundo images become inscribed within those traditions but as a disruptive narrative, which aims at opening up space for new cosmologies.