Leon Tovar Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Santiago Cárdenas: What We See and What Stares Back. This exhibition approaches the work of Santiago Cárdenas through a simple yet radical question: How does an image appear before us?
Cárdenas does not merely represent objects; he reveals their very presence, translating ideas from the phenomenology of the image onto the canvas. In his paintings, objects— chalkboards, hooks, ties, umbrellas— do not serve a narrative function. They simply present themselves. They do so with remarkable precision, constructed through light, shadow, edges, and distance. As we stand before them, the objects produce a phenomenological rupture: are we seeing an image, or encountering an object? The answer is both, an object-image.
Yet we do not only look at these objects; they also look back at us.
What we see is the evident: austere surfaces, exact framing, measured light. What looks back at us is the force of their appearance— an intensity that arrests us, addresses us, and causes us to hesitate, if only for a moment, between object and painting.
It is within this tension— between what we see and what looks back at us— that the viewer’s experience unfolds. Before asking a painting to “mean” something, we suspend noise, anecdote, easy symbolism, and biography in order to attend to its mode of appearing.
The body plays a central role in Cárdenas’ work. The spectator physically engages with the objects the artist renders, and it is through the body that this exchange of gazes occurs. To observe these object-images is also to be observed by them. In this physical relationship between body and object, a phenomenological limbo emerges. Viewer and object-image share the same space, forming a unique relationship in which the subject becomes so deeply involved that, for a moment, they too feel like an object—no different from those hanging on the wall.
Cárdenas thus invites us to reconsider both how we see and how we are seen.
One of the most influential Colombian masters in the history of modern art, Santiago Cárdenas has left an enduring mark both nationally and internationally. His work demonstrates extraordinary refinement and technical mastery. Within his pictorial universe unfolds a heightened world of observation and delicacy, where the image becomes object: the board is a board, the cardboard is cardboard, the silk is silk—beyond pigment alone.
Cárdenas presents a deceptively simple reality that can be understood as an exaltation of the everyday: the overlooked objects that surround us daily, which here we are invited to look at anew… and which, in turn, look back at us.
