Orange Alert | Santiago Velazco in the Blanes Museum (2025)
- Gimena Pino
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
In this exhibition, Santiago Velazco presents a pictorial universe developed over the past five years, incorporating multiple techniques and supports in his study of forms and space. With a powerful palette reduced to orange and black, the artist develops a contemporary sensibility of urgency and tension, set within an atmosphere of uncertainty where unprecedented energy unfolds alongside a state of constant alert. The works traverse a creative spiral that extends beyond painting alone, encompassing cutouts, drawing, vectorization, photography, and stencilmaking to configure an ecosystem of its own. From these landscapes emerge pieces perpetually on the verge of implosion and conflict, challenging their very survival.
Associated with imminence, without reaching the consummation of danger, the color orange contributes to a sensation of lost control, recreating a toxic and suffocating environment that alters the senses. Orange Alert situates itself within that “abstraction rooted in reality” formulated by Matisse, but twenty-five years into the 21st century, the present yields a very different body of work. In a hyperconnected era of sensory overload, where the future is no longer seen as promising but as threatening—ecologically, economically, socially— artistic practice reflects not only the fragmented way in which we perceive the world, but also an inherently human tenacity for constructing fragile equilibriums without guarantees.
Santiago Velazco studied Graphic Design at Universidad ORT and trained with Enrique Badaró and Fernando López Lage at FAC. He completed printmaking studies with Jorge Galaviz at the Museo Torres García and co-founded the art space KIOSCO (2012-2016). His work has been exhibited in Uruguay and internationally, including Argentina, Spain, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Sweden, Belgium and United States, and Europe. Through his practice, he explores fragmentation, impulse, and chaos as reflections of contemporary culture’s complexity. He lives and works in Montevideo.
