The Moment V Painting

1974 Born in Fortaleza, Brazil. Eduardo Santos works with gravity the way other artists work with oils or ink. Gravity guides the line and pins down his disparate materials of sand, earth, paint and varnish. Each layer accretes like sediment. The dense dry texture of sand and the lumpen rivulets formed by earth mixed with paint generate a haptic experience something like standing inside a river cave or being pinned beneath the glassy swell of a wave. Santos credits his relationship to visceral, highly textural-materials to a childhood spent in the north of Brazil, in a terrain “where the river meets the ocean” and experiences with his grandfather, an indigenous Amazonian potter, Santos would mimic in the clay of the rive's edge. The humility of simple materials; a conflation of the natural and the ‘found’; the tactility of hand-made and rough-hewn things and, ultimately, primal landscapes, all play a role in the artist’s work. This series is also imbued with a strong sense of place. This is not painting about painting, but an invocation of earth, sky and water influenced by desert journeys in Morocco, South America, and the antipodes.