Cuban-American painter Cesar Santos recreates iconic paintings with a contemporary twist for his series known as Syncretism. His intriguing works simultaneously pay homage, merge, and play with Renaissance art and Modernism. Santos’ collection of paintings tackle the famous works of some renowned painters including the likes of Vermeer, Picasso, Pollack, and Da Vinci.
After studying the work of fine artists in Italy, allowing him to hone his craft, Santos says, “I came back with this curriculum, the experience of traditional painting in the classical manner, which I mix with the experience I had in conceptual art.” He aptly adds, “My tools are imagination and technique; they are the essence and the basis of my work.”
Having the technical background, Santos takes his images to the next level. Rather than simply exemplifying his skilled hand at reproducing Girl with a Pearl Earring, Santos re-imagines the origins of the famed painting. The artist presents both an impressive rendition of the well-known portrait and its imagined painter–a young woman in nothing more than a bra, looking directly at the viewer in the same vein as the painting’s subject.
