Chris Santa Maria: New Paintings

Chris Santa Maria's current paintings appear from a distance to be perhaps photographs of painstakingly made and colored mannequins or figurines. The gaze of the subject comes flatly at the viewer without expression, only the lines made on the face from a lifetime of laughing or scowling giving a hint of expression. In contrast, the eyes are almost too alive, like glass orbs on dolls or the bright stare of Byzantine funerary portraits. Up close, the illusion comes apart as tubes of oil paint stippled in little waves are seen to make up a surface that stands almost half an inch away from the surrounding raw canvas under clear varnish. The flesh is rendered in fat impasto, with a myriad of hues combined to portray what we often think of as beige or brown.

Santa Maria, who depicts only friends and family members, insists that "the neutral expression of my subjects in these paintings lets me see their spirit, somehow, by letting their own face's history reveal ultimately, who they are and what our relationship is, and who I am as a painter, too."