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Kristof Santy Would Rather Trust Objective Reality than Reach for Eve’s Apple

The self-taught artist, whose paintings have hung alongside Picassos and Warhols, describes a practice rooted in sustained attention rather than storytelling.

Ravel reportedly called Boléro an “orchestral tissue without music.” It is a single melody passed between instruments for roughly 15 minutes over an unchanging snare rhythm, growing louder each time until it collapses. Kristof Santy took the title for his new solo exhibition at Sorry We're Closed in Brussels, which opened in September across all three of the gallery’s floors. The borrowing fits. A Santy painting may show a bottle, a basket of food or a bicycle, but each object matters less than the role it plays in the overall structure of a given work.

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His subjects are generally modest and mundane. Through layering, repetition, careful detail and saturated color, they become strange and affecting. There is no plot, no larger context, no allegory waiting to be decoded. As the exhibition materials point out, “Santy approaches painting not as a vehicle for spectacle or commentary, but as a sustained act of attention.” He turns that attention on everything from ceramic chimney fragments and Sunday painters’ canvases to devotional statuettes, odds and ends from the flea market and the Flemish folk tales and customs he grew up with. In conversation, he is blunt about the fact that he would rather show that an apple can simply be an apple than drag in the one from Genesis, and he says he believes in objective reality, not fate. For him, the ordinary world is inherently beautiful; there’s no need to layer on symbolism or narrative.

Born in 1987, Santy worked in a factory before committing to art and taught himself most of what he knows. The factory shaped the work, though not in an obvious way. The group lunch breaks, the identical lunchboxes and the same sandwiches eaten every day left him convinced that life is largely repetition and boredom, even as something worth looking at hides inside both. The Ravel reference, in that sense, is an accurate description of how he sees.

His international breakthrough came in 2021, when his work was exhibited by dealer Thomas Serruys, and select pieces have since appeared in “Painting after Painting” at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, “F**klore” at ABBY in Kortrijk, “Trans Europa Express” at Kunsthaus NRW Aachen and “Animalia” at the Heidi Horten Collection in Vienna. The latter put his paintings in the same rooms as artworks by Picasso, Warhol, George Condo and Damien Hirst.

"BOLERO" Artist: Kristof Santy Venue: Sorry We're Closed Address: Rue des Minimes 39, 1000 Brussels,........

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