Joseph
Santarpia

My practice captures a stark contrast of darkness and luminosity, referencing both a sense of visceral interiority and expansive space in order to address embodiment, release, autopoiesis, and sympoiesis. I achieve a range of abstracted and representational imagery using pigment and fluid on paper along with monotype printing and photographic processes. Through series’ of ink and watercolor paintings, collages, cyanotypes, and some 3 and 4D pieces, my work indexes the comparability of and transitory nature between interiority, flesh, bodily mechanics, and corporeal structure, to that of the expanse of space into which bodily actions extend. My materials interact through varying ratios of fluid, light, and object. Pigments saturate, concentrate, and isolate, articulating new visual languages: inks bleed, paper buckles, fluid stains.

Following the procedure and recovery of my spinal fusion surgery I’ve grown to be intensely attentive to my bodily sensations. The lived experience and physical consequences of this procedure have since informed my life and art practice greatly. As a result, my interest not only emerges from my own distinct embodied condition, but from my fixation on expansive space, driven by my desire to link the interiority of my experience to the extensivity of the physical world my body inhabits.