Cristina Santos Muniesa

Statement

Cristina Santos Muniesa is a Spanish visual artist currently based in Berlin. She obtained her MFA in Valencia UPV and broadened her artistic practice and education in Mexico City UNAM. In her work she analyses our daily life relationship with image production and reception within the Internet, smartphones and social networks. Her artistic practice may use photography and video, but it is deeply rooted in painting.

The image is fast, easy to produce, easy to swallow, an excess that becomes emptiness. Spectators, before the horror of boredom, can’t hold themselves back. They are caught in a continuous present of visual excitement where, once exhausted, language becomes thinner, loses meaning and tends towards abstraction.

Through her pieces, Santos Muniesa reflects on how the level of involvement and awareness of users affects the distance we maintain with the reality and meaning of images, without losing sign of the capitalist interests benefiting from people’s mind’s limitation and transformation of our impulses into bad habits.

Her practice compares visual accelerated time with pictorial production, focusing on the events affecting interpretation and access to information, under an aesthetic of the residual, of everything that can’t be retained.

When the distance between reality and its representation increases, when reason and vision are insufficient, where can we find shape, skin, contact?

GlogauAIR Project

LIMIT 40 MINUTES, 1H 9M DAILY AVERAGE, 1H 54M TODAY

The spectator-user is trapped in a continuous present of visual excitement where once exhausted, language becomes thinner, loses sense and tends to abstraction.

The project analyzes the relationship between the economical exploitation of the weaknesses of our mind and the saturation of free-time in the quotidian use of internet and mobile devices.

Platforms Economy benefits themselves from our mind’s limitations and transforms our impulses into bad habits. App’s notifications as a reward, along with an easy logic and little involvement of the subject, generates a sensation of transparency and relational immediacy which, however, affects our attention-span and turns out into a non-stop visual consumption, a voracious dependency that holds us back.

Videos, photographs, painting and their arrangement in different installations would crowd and completely saturate the space in an atmosphere of ephemeral rewards that would overwhelm the viewer and transform the meaning and content of the image into abstraction.

CV Summary

Education

• 2017. Promoe International Exchange Programme, Visual Arts Master’s Degree, FAD-UNAM, México.
• 2014 – 2016. Art Production Master’s Degree, Facultat de Belles Arts de San Carles, UPV, Valencia.
• 2016. Medialab Prado and UNED Course. Art and Internet – The net as a field of investigation for the new artistic practices. Juan Martín de Prada.
• 2014 – 2015. MECD Collaboration Scholarship within Drawing Department, Facultat de Belles Arts de San Carles, UPV, Valencia.
• 2008 – 2013. Licenciatura en Bellas Artes, Facultat de San Carles, U.P.V.

Awards and Grants

• 2021. H.A.C. Grant, GlogauAir residency, Berlin.
• 2020. Acquisition prize, MUCC museum, Castellón.
• 2018. Artists Call #017, Mr. Pink Gallery, Valencia.
• 2017. First prize, solo show, V Call Sala d’Arcs, Chirivella Soriano Foundation, Sala d’Arcs, Valencia.
• 2016. Selection, FULL CONTACT, International Photography Festival SCAN, Tarragona. Selection, IV Mardel Painting Prize, at museum Centro del Carmen Cultura Contemporánea, Valencia. A Quemarropa Residency, Alicante.
• 2015. XVII International CALL, Galería Luis Adelantado, Valencia. ART<35 BS/2015, organized by Sala Parés and Trama Gallery, Barcelona and Bilbao. Selection, Senyera Painting Prize, Atarazanas Hall, Valencia.
• 2013. XV Art production grant, Xavier Pousa, Mondariz Balneario Foundation.
• 2012. Acquisition prize, XXIV Painting Biennial, Paterna.
• 2011. Art production grant, Curso de Pintores Pensionados, at Quintanar Palace, Segovia.

Solo Shows

• 2017. SCROLL, Luis Nishizawa Gallery, FAD-UNAM, Ciudad de México. Chemtrails, Sala d’Arcs, Chirivella Soriano Foundation, Valencia.

Group Exhibition

• 2018. I International Congress Atenea, Josep Renau Hall, Valencia.
• 2016. PAM! PAM!, at museum Centro del Carmen Cultura Contemporánea, Valencia. Confluencias, Showroom at Mustang Art Gallery, Elche, Alicante.
• 2015. FISAD, First International Festival of Schools of Arts and Design, Accademia Albertina, Turín. GetxoArte, Contemporary art practices Salon. Las arenas, Getxo, Bizkaia. Selecta-15, Atarazanas Hall, Valencia.

Artworks in Collection

• FAD-UNAM Cultural Fund, Ciudad de México.
• MUCC, Castellón
• Lluís Coromina Foundation, Banyoles.
• Real Academia de San Quirce, Segovia.
• Mondariz Balneario Foundation, Pontevedra.

Gallery