ARMIG SANTOS

Practice

Santos received a BFA in Painting from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico in 2018. He has described Puerto Rico as the central subject of his work since his student years, with his practice shaped by a desire to look inward at the island’s own artistic and historical narratives rather than relying on outside frames of reference. Before establishing himself primarily as a painter, he was also involved in curatorial projects, a background that informs the research-based character of his work and his attention to the circulation of images and stories.

His paintings often begin with source material gathered from blogs, amateur history pages, low-budget documentaries, photojournalistic archives, and other informal repositories. Many episodes in Puerto Rico’s past remain poorly documented or unevenly represented, and Santos build pictures that move between historical reference and painterly invention. Working in oil and acrylic on canvas, he constructs landscapes, figures, boats, fences, skies, and sea passages that feel at once specific and elusive, as though history were being recovered through fragments, atmosphere, and feeling rather than direct illustration.

Works and Exhibitions

Santos’s paintings frequently connect personal and collective memory with the political life of the island. Works such as S.M.A. and Trials (La Crema), both from 2022, show how he uses landscape and coded imagery to approach overlooked histories, while paintings such as Procesión en Vieques III (2022), now in the Whitney Museum collection, point to his interest in ritual, place, and the afterlives of historical events. In more recent work, the sea has emerged as an especially charged motif, appearing as a site of passage, danger, fantasy, and historical projection.

That direction was evident in Memoria at Half Gallery in 2024, where Santos drew on the Cerro Maravilla murders of 1978 in Puerto Rico while staging the ocean as both emotional landscape and historical witness. Across exhibitions such as Yellow Flowers at Calderón, TAMO AQUÍ / WE HERE at Embajada, and NÜ MOON at New Image Art, he has developed a visual language that combines research, myth, and painterly atmosphere without becoming didactic. His inclusion in No existe un mundo posthuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art further positioned his work within a wider conversation about contemporary Puerto Rican art and its political urgencies.

In 2026, Lévy Gorvy Dayan announced the gallery’s first solo exhibition Baladas with Santos, opening on 16 April 2026 and debuting a series of paintings that explore the artist’s personal and pastoral relationship to the islands of Puerto Rico, drawing upon historical, archival, and ecological sources of inspiration. The exhibition’s title, Santos references José Luis González’s 1978 novel Baladas de otro tiempo (Ballad of Another Time), which remains a significant representation of traditional farming—or campesino—culture in Puerto Rico. Remarking on his new body of work, Santos states, ‘Every painting is a ballad to Puerto Rico in its own way. The works are reminders of the past but also a way to understand what is happening now.’

Armig Santos FAQs

Ocula | 2026