If I were asked to name only one person who fully embodies the term “Artist”, the name would spill out before I could even make a conscious decision: “Santiago”.
Why is this so?
Uruguayan artist, Santiago Márquez, is one of those rare people who simply cannot stop making art. He doesn’t wait until inspiration strikes. He just creates all day as if it is his job. In fact, he makes a good case for why art is a job and how the very definition of art lies in the exchange between artist and audience. This is only the tip of the iceberg in his philosophical thinking.
Santiago is not afraid to go deep and question everything. Where many people, including artists, seek a level of certainty, he isn’t afraid to remain in a space of unknowing, even if it means living a life of constant discomfort.
His approach to art is an unapologetic yet playful stream of consciousness, using any and all mediums that he can get his hands on. Rather than focusing on a single style or medium and trying to perfect a single artwork over time, he is consistently finishing works and sharing them in a constant in-the-moment communication between himself, the work, and the audience.
Lastly, there is an immediate honesty to Santiago that pervades everything he does. Whether viewing his visual art, listening to his music, observing his endless stream of X posts, or having a conversation, you will quickly realize that there is never a point where the artist separates from the person. Nothing is stilted or calculated about Santiago. And through this free flowing way of life, a natural sense of humor is born.
Through this long-form format, I hope to capture the essence of the experience that Santiago’s many fans enjoy among the NFT/“crypto-art” community, which mostly resides on the X platform. My hope is that even if you don’t participate on the platform you will get a good glimpse of the full picture here.
All images are clickable links. Since I’m only able to share a small fraction of his immense catalog here, I encourage you to click away and go down the rabbit hole.
Enjoy!
Are you good at this job?
I am one of the best.
I hope I’m also helping improve the industry standards.
In your experience, does being incredibly good-looking improve your art, or does making good art improve your looks? Which should artists focus on first?
The end of the spiral of how to be good looking and why be good looking is “why be good looking: to attract others and to be told you can do whatever you want, how to achieve those better: feel confident”, so art is first, Art is what makes me look naturally beautiful.
Why are you compelled to spend most of your time making art? What does it do for you?
It’s probably the only life I can imagine now. But at first I wanted to get to a point where most of my time was spent making art, and before that, I was uncomfortable and in periods and waves of sadness, madness, boredom. I also conceive as heroic waking up and making works of art and investing all my energy in that, unconsciously, like a warm thought, before stopping and thinking. Like a sacred war. Very epic. I tend to overreact a bit about it.
Your primary method seems to be stream-of-consciousness mark-making by hand, whether on paper or with drawing software. What draws you to this process?
I used to make some plans, I think. I have in a drawer somewhere notes, like sketches that were for pieces. This is from like 2003. Later I think I haven’t planned too much.
I used to paint in little cardboards and papers.
Some things can’t be done again.
And the mark-making was my way to take some stress out of my body(?), not sure.
You probably have seen before that I am often a person that does not like art being taken too much as therapy. On one side I think art is a job and has to make things happen in a way. An artist has to be there, present, has to be accountable for the art. And art has to ask what is art, where are we going, what does art mean to society and life and to others.
I understand that an artist says “I do the art just for myself”, and maybe it is true in some cases. But what happens with others is a part of what makes an item a work of art.
I also get this sense of my work being sitting here, wondering about things, learning something, reacting to the news, reacting to the news that happen in my friends’ lives, making food. Cooking is very special to me and makes me proud and also makes me feel I own more of my life, more parts of it. So all that life outside of the art is part of my process too.
So with the mark-making I think it’s not me doing therapy in front of everyone but it has a component of something I can’t stop doing.
Not every piece starts like that but almost every piece I am compulsively poking something, color, lines, parts.
And on the side of stream of consciousness turning to something with a more complex or in-order shape, absolutely. It’s how I read history and life. Things happen for no reason and become other bigger things and often we try to find a logic and the story and the intention and evolution of an institution, a life path, a city, is tied to chaos and whim.
Plus, what is at the bottom of stream of consciousness? I don’t know. But it hosts angles on real life and memory and how we interpret what has happened to us. And also every defense of the unconscious mind that surrealism has made but in my case I can’t or won’t commit to whatever comes from the bottom of my mind and I often build something with it, even if not too rational, yes intentional.
You make an interesting point about art being a job and that there is a certain amount of responsibility that comes along with it. Are you thinking about this when you work? Do you consider how the piece might affect the viewer?
A lot of what needs to be part of the exceptional sense of common sense created by the viewer + me + the context of cryptoart + the context of art in this century + the context of art in Uruguay and in my life, is not in the images, it’s the shared experience around the images and the way I share them that makes the full piece. Or the interface in a wide sense, the moment and site and how. Art is a job whether I am there to say it or not, that’s the first part.
Artists are pointed as lazy or lucky or glorified as people making sacrifices with their life to achieve some kind of magical link to other reality. And I think the full spectrum is true cause every human and any human is capable of all that and lives from a moment to the next one, different definitions of own self and appreciations of life, community, identity, related to what they do most of the time, and what they do in order to feed themselves and their families.
I agree or see what you mean with responsibility, absolutely.
Do you think of cooking and making art are a similar act, or do they provide two completely different types of satisfaction for you?
They are similar but cooking is more important, cause my family eats it.
Maybe I find a time to think more slowly while cooking, or less attached to every problem on earth. Art has this capacity to swallow every other activity and make it a part of it, art. And this is great most of the time because you can stop reading the news for ten years and still be not too irresponsible, just reflecting on slower waves and bigger pictures of politics, the world, life, evolution, the decay or collapse of human civilization, the failure of the human project as a whole. But also this gravity art can have that makes everything part of the art, can be overwhelming in the sense of “where is there a moment for me to relax” right? Everyone comes here (art) to see and feel a bit different from plain everyday life, and I am here taking care of the hotel, or the party headquarters, or the restaurant. I can imagine and I have met through my life, people with real jobs that used to paint on Sundays and free time. And I’m like “So what do I do when I want to rest? Type stuff in a gray room?” I think I haven’t still figured it out but I can say cooking feels very good and I get tired and it’s probably what I would spend my time doing if they tell me I have nothing to take care of for some days or months.
But also I don‘t want it as a job, I know that. I like cooking to be in that place in my life, the one it has now. I worked cooking and I have studied cooking for a while, when very young, and I was always falling back to art.
Your view of stream-of-consciousness and of life being a series of random cause-and-effect events suggests that the way you work as an artist is a reflection of how you operate in life as a whole. You seem to live in the moment the majority of the time. Is that a correct assumption?
Yeah, it’s a correct assumption but it took work to get here. I was kind of an OCD child or propense to I think, maybe not huge but I could have taken that path more strongly.
Rationally we all know that anxiety can’t take us too far or help control actual things, so I just tried very hard to make that clear rational knowledge about life and the mind, a thing useful for me. But of course the mind needs balance and we all need to feel bad or anxious from time to time so my brain does it randomly and I think I can point it as a chemical need from my brain when this happens, or a logical need for my mind is maybe a way to put it too.
I also lost a bit the ability to relate to ways of using and sensing time. I see this in most of the music I’ve made and shared.
More of Santiago’s music on Bandcamp
There are things that became very core of my way to understand art, and that aren’t exactly what I advocate for right now, or aspects I consider necessary or relevant right now, for example, when I was like 16 to 20 I was always painting and drawing and trying to get to something, and in my country there’s this painter from the 1920s called Joaquín Torres García, very boring to everyone from here, for the fact that the art is everywhere, but influential in many ways in how we conceive art.
And there was this take from him, defending abstract and not representational art, that was about taking the narrative side of painting out of painting, in a way, giving back to literature what belongs to literature and doing painting-specific things when we are painting or as painters, or to do the task and work and priesthood of being a painter. Absolutely something I don’t care about anymore, but that being learned so early had a big impact on me so my approach to time and stories and diachronic sense of time is kind of affected by that forever, in art and in life.
If life is a series of events that happen for no reason, are you comfortable with this? Do you ever have crises of meaninglessness?
Yeah, wow.
I don’t even know how to reply but this is possibly on my mind every second.
I guess it’s one of those situations where if you consider everything is abyss you stop fear falling. I am always uncomfortable. With facts, with truth, epistemology, ideas, sense of what is an idea, my sense of what my story is, my intuition of what could happen next.
I felt this so hard that living was impossible, so now it’s under control and I can do things, clean a house, raise a kid, make food at certain times of the day.
But yeah nothing is certain, and we probably do art because of this, and also it’s likely that if we keep contact with that side of life and the mind and truth and possibility, we are stronger to avoid becoming a cog, maybe, not sure.
I think we can feel life as having a reason or reasons and we can make that grow inside ourselves, and it’s a nice thing to do for us and for others. It doesn’t need to be there as a preexisting truth to be discovered, we can make it up and it’s fine too.
You are unbelievably prolific. In the context of value in the NFT space, this is often interpreted as a negative thing due to dilution, yet your work continues to sell on a daily basis. Why do you think this is?
I think that people that tried to resell my work lost hope, and new people or the same people, now buy it with no hope of reselling.
Do you always finish pieces in one sitting?
I make some in one sitting but many go to an ocean of unminted and unfinished stuff and sometimes I pick things from those and keep on working. I had projects that lasted some days or weeks in the sense of one single piece being worked on and corrected.
You seem to create whatever you feel like on any given day. Sometimes your work reflects your signature style, and other times it disregards it completely. Do you think about style or your audience’s perception of this?
It’s true, there’s a more recognizable body of work.
When the center of my practice was ink line drawings I had like limbs to that style too or new ideas and research paths, and I also had that feeling of “will this be my work forever?”, or “is this the only thing I know?” but we are talking I felt I only had one idea cause I was sitting drawing at that moment in that style, and that same afternoon I was doing something different than that and the day after I could feel again I only knew one thing. So I got used to those waves too, and now I can live those periods with more pleasure and less anxiety, so if I need to spend three days making just the pieces that are coming the easiest to me now, and this is vector big pieces with that pale orange background and shapes floating like a cluster or cloud, I can do so.
Most of your work is hand-drawn, but you also create art with AI. How do you approach AI art? Does it stem from the same creative impulse as your hand-drawn work, or are you exploring a different concept altogether?
Yeah and I think that what vectoring stuff would be like a third one cause instead of one image coming all together like with AI, or one image being built little by little like in hand drawn, the vectoring kind of “burns” the image, makes a new thing with whatever image I pick, and them I move it like putting in order a puzzle or a house or a desk or a poem.
Now I mix all of them when I can, and sometimes it’s also screenshots from blender or nomad sculptures, and sometimes it’s photos of my oil paintings or my drawings.
The thing that it does for me is different in all of those, but it’s also like, the images appear, then I have a lot of images, then I have some kind of hierarchy in my mind about what each image makes in the whole abundance of files and lost files and possible files, and then it gets sometimes improved, and other times just picked, like when AI artists used to say they work curating those outputs, well it’s the same for me but half of it is hand drawn.
Above: secret demons meeting
And also I am constantly using image to image or the blend function on Midjourney, or a model feature or a style transfer feature that neural frames has, so I am feeding other AIs to each AI and also I am feeding them my drawn work.
There are many fears and arguments against AI in art. What are your thoughts?
I am afraid but also afraid of air not being breathable in ten years or twenty,
but also 15 years ago oil was going to be over by now,
and as we see gas cars are there, petrol wars are still there too…
so maybe the predictions are fabricated too and this is slower than it seems.
But yes AI can become our boss.
How to save the planet:
Communism.
You also make sculptures with a 3D printer. Tell us about those.
I love doing this
I have no idea where it can go
I learn like a technique
Like as a lawyer finishes work day and gets home and he has in the garage those boats that go inside a bottle
A hobby?
but it’s also art-sculptures so
I am lost about them
And I think that’s a great part of it too.
Like, I have colonized all the parts of my life that reason could reach, with some meaning and sense and they go to a place in my map of what my life is and what am I doing. And with these sculptures I just kept on making them and they were more and more and they made no sense at all, or they do in a simple way, they look like raisins or vaginas or rocks or piles of clothes, but at the same time it’s something compulsive, or was for some weeks, that I couldn't explain at all or place in my idea of what each thing is and what does it do in my whole system of life and beliefs and art and how do I feel about everything.
What do you do when you are not making art?
Eat. If I can. Read a book to my kid. Study. Watch a movie. Go for a walk. Think.
Feel.
Send a message to my mom.
Your daughter is obviously very important to you and you seem to do a lot of activities together. Do you do art together, or do you mostly work on it while she is away?
We do a lot of art together, but she also has her own projects, she’s into zine making, they have little pockets or hidden things, and conceptual things happen in the zine/book, that relate its materiality with the thing it’s telling, very cool.
Is there anything you’d like to complain about while we’re here?
Yeah in fact I do. I was at the dentist today, it was horrible. And the landlord too, I have to leave this house very soon and get a new one. And time, I don’t have enough time today, it’s already 10 pm and I have some things to do and there’s not gonna be a moment in this day when I say ok I can stop, I can breathe and just do nothing, there’s a lot to do.
Is there a common misunderstanding about you or your work?
There is. There are, many.
Always, there will always be.
Swimming pools. Thoughts?
They will save the planet.
What is Goblincore?
ok so amazingly it already existed when I created it.
or not so amazingly.
So there’s
2- goblincore original
3- goblincore by @juliakponsford
1- mine was about something after Joelma-wave, when coincidentally after listening to Joelma and Banda Calypso for some months, I started seeing a style of pixel art that I could make and liked and started making more and more automatic to me.
2- the original one is I think people that are like juggalos but goblinesque.
3- and Julia’s is about nature.
Let’s talk about NFT Uruguay. What will it be like when it is finally manifested? What will I experience?
It’s going to be very special, first of all there’s going to be a virtual NFT Uruguay, and it’s going to be a place of discussion and balance of what has been happening in NFTs since hic et nunc shut down, and what does it mean to be a part of a global arts scene, and why is it possible that the north-south or developed-undeveloped sites privilege gap replicates itself so hard in a non-local thing like cryptoart, beyond pure logics and material rational linked consequences of root facts. And we will also make a blenderpalooza, 48 or 72 hours of live blender by friends and specialists.
How do you name your pieces?
I try to think of what the name would be if the piece was something alive and it gave a name to me.
We need more artists like you.
haha, I am not even a gamer. And I don’t particularly love fast cars, lol.
I think I love words.
Haha. Perfect. Thank you for the chat, my friend.
Thanks man, this was so much fun. Thanks for your kind view on my art.
More to Explore
Santiago’s variety of accounts and monikers go far and wide, so the links throughout this post likely won’t capture all of it, but everything shared here will surely lead you down the path to discovering more.
santiagoney.xyz - Santiago’s main website with links to a few main accounts, an artist statement, and a couple of custom made drawing tools you can play with.
hello I am drawing live - Almost six straight hours of continuous drawing.
santiago, humankernel.tez - Alt X accounts.
fx(hash) - Long-form code-based generative collections.
Foundation - More works on ETH.
magic bubblegum, Land of Mystery- Two more alt Objkt accounts.
Thank you for reading. Subscribe for more.
-LW❤️🔥
Wow. This is a really great interview here.
Amazing interview with a non-stop working artist.