Santiago Serrano is named corresponding academician at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando was founded in 1752 under the reign of Ferdinand VI. Born in the middle of the Enlightenment, it was one of the most ambitious cultural institutions in Spain in the 18th century. It was intended to place the plastic arts as the center of modern thought. In this way it was intended to unite artistic practice to the intellectual and cultural development of the country.
Throughout its history, the Academy has accompanied the great transformations of Spanish art. Among his most important academics is Francisco de Goya, who came to occupy the position of director of painting. Currently, the Academy remains one of the great cultural references of Spain, serving as a museum and as a space for research and reflection.
Santiago Serrano has been recently commemorated academic of this institution, so from Marquesa Gallery we want to take a tour of the trajectory of this artist who becomes part of one of the most relevant cultural institutions in the country.
Santiago Serrano during the ceremony.
A journey built on coherence
Santiago Serrano has more than sixty individual exhibitions in the national and international framework. His works can be seen in large collections and institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana or the Helga de Alvear Collection, among others.
Santiago Serrano, Crossroads II, 1990
Serrano is one of the most important artists of the generation of painters of the seventies who returned to painting as a dominant practice. In addition, it is one of the few that keeps intact the ethical and aesthetic principles of the moment, including expressive singularity, nonconformity and experimental commitment.
His work is framed in an abstract and conceptual aspect, following a line related to artists such as Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich or Barnett Newman. In this way he has consolidated himself as one of the most relevant artists of the Spanish panorama in this century and the past.
The Academy and the permanence of painting
As mentioned above, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando occupies a central place in Spanish cultural history. During its long history it has become a place for conservation and reflection, but also a space where tradition and contemporaneity dialogue.
Santiago Serrano, Amarillo acrylic on board, 1970-71
The entry of Santiago Serrano as an academic is very significant, since it is a sign of coherence and tenacity. His way of using painting is presented as an austere pictorial language that is in turn linked with a narrative richness in the human. It should be noted two essential arguments in the work of Santiago, first, his evolution of the deployment of plastic forms. His work ranges from the most traditional format of the canvas to geometric supports. Second, its connection to the world of symbols, myths, and in general the human narrative.
Abstraction as a Contemporary Experience
In 1968, Santiago Serrano obtained a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation that allowed him to make a key stay in Paris, where he came into contact with international abstraction and the work of Antonio Guansé. This experience marked a turning point in his plastic language, moving him away from the initial figuration to orient him towards an essential abstraction, loaded with symbolic and spiritual resonances.
During the eighties, Serrano’s language acquired a great formal concentration. The colors went out, and the geometry took on a great symbolic weight. The painting becomes a visual gathering space. It incorporated architectural forms such as the apse, the cross or the arch, which although austere elements, are also charged with meaning. Silence becomes a determining component in his paintings. Later series such as Silenciarios and Chimeras continued to expand this research into space and perception.
Serrano understands abstraction as a language that allows the viewer a sensory and spiritual experience. Geometry appears in his work as breathing and balance. For Serrano, looking implies delay, entering the work and the artistic imagination of the artist.
Santiago Serrano, Sin título, 1972.
Geometry of Silence
In 2024 it was performed on Marquesa Gallery Geometrías del Silencio. Exhibition that in turn, inaugurated the gallery.
Mariano Navarro, who curated the exhibition, emphasizes the dialogue of Santiago’s work with the depths of the existential. To do this, he points out that it is in his titles - for example, Silenciarios and chimeras - where that first approach is located. Santiago Serrano himself stated, “Titles matter as much as they make sense. A title can define a work, but not occupy it.”
Santiago Serrano, Silenciarios y Quimeras
Through its titles you can also relate Serrano’s work with the poetic and poetry, due to the formal richness of the words, their meanings and etymologies. For his most recent works, which began in the pandemic of 2020, Santiago Serrano describes them as "an endearing inner look towards that illusion he wanted to give to others", as "butterflies", since the inspiration for these works came to him in two different ways. The first, from the singer Jorge Drexler, with his song Quimera. The second, through an analogical sequence that defines his way of looking: "I thought in Greek means soul" and, "the knowledge of the soul, and soul, in Greek, is also butterfly and, at the same time, worm, that is, pupa, metamorphosis (...). Quimera is a poetic way of naming an illusion, (...)".
Hollowing out: creating space for the gaze
Ahuecar: 50 años de pintura was another exhibition held at Marquesa Gallery, in 2025. On this occasion it was a retrospective that aimed to propose a chronological journey through some of the most representative stages of the work of Santiago Serrano. In this way, they wanted to follow the evolution of their plastic thinking over time.
Photograph of the exhibition Ahuecar: 50 años de pintura.
Hollowing refers not only to a formal action, but also to an attitude. It’s not about filling, but creating space, preparing the place for something to come up. Suggest. As in his painting, where everything is reduced to the essential: plane, matter, rhythm. Nothing left over, nothing distracting.
This retrospective allowed to observe the consistency in the plastic language of Santiago, he himself affirms it: "Painting is the only thing in my life in which I have been coherent".
Persistence of a look
The incorporation of Santiago Serrano to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando recognizes the great artistic trajectory and relevance of his work in the Spanish panorama.
Serrano’s work remains coherent from its beginnings, insisting on the contemplation and the importance of space and time in painting. Expressive singularity and experimental commitment keep his artistic practice as relevant and refreshing.
In this way, from Marquesa Gallery we wanted to dedicate a few lines to remember the important figure of Santiago Serrano, now academic of one of the most significant artistic institutions in Spain.