Avant-gardists have not treated religious themes for several centuries. From the start, Santiago García Sáenz has been painting with pure avant-gardist's freshness and he set out to develop his project, already a kind of crusade, "I am looking for you, (Latin) America ". This was the theme of an important exhibition held at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in 1987.
Nowadays, when painting either emerges directly from the interior self or is sifted through the mind, García Sáenz finds solutions deep in his heart and adds a cosmic dimension to his depiction of customs. His quest for (Latin) America has become more intense. He passed through varied Argentinean landscapes until, fate or accident, he comes to enter the field of Christian imagery. García Sáenz was appointed to paint the Way of the Cross and the altar ensemble in the church of Santa Cecilia, in Castelar, a position dreamt of by so many ancient artists. He produced an original Way of the Cross with the scenes flowing continuously along a wall of the temple of Villa Udaondo.

In his paintings, his approach to spiritual art, which has a strong European influence here, is personal. He has achieved a balance between expressionism with reminiscences of primeval simplicity and the gestual quality that has characterized his work so far. He builds up a synthesis of Argentinean Mesopotamian landscape and those perpetual biblical figures.
García Sáenz intends to continue his quest for (Latin) America until 1992, the year of the 500 th anniversary of European settlement in our lands. Ambitious and plenty of faith, he has enthusiastically employed his creativity to transform his pilgrimage into a personal re-discovery of the new world and its never ending relationship with Christianity. Those who have been following the progress of this research have watched this process through the eyes of this young artist and his eternal, optimistic pictures.

Edward Shaw
ARTINF N°76, Buenos Aires, 1989

I am particularly pleased to mark the work of Santiago García Sáenz. I have known his work for many years and I consider it to be the result of a very interesting combination of sensitivity to the landscape and a union of it with a mystical spirit, which is very singular nowadays.
For this approximation to (Latin) America, among many others, G.S. has found a very special bias. Sometimes it combines with the depiction of customs, which highlights the nature of the work and the investigation that underlies it. While I think of Figari and Torres García as the central figures in the Latin American panorama, considering also the Mexican artists and many others who have succumbed to the temptation of the "Latin American" spirit, I believe that G.S. has found a very individual disposition, and for this reason he is entitled to receive the grant.

Samuel Paz
Buenos Aires, Abril de 1996

The jungle of Misiones, which towards the end of the 20 th century, started to move down to the La Plata River, has already reached Buenos Aires. Moving along the Pan-American Route, cut the General Paz avenue in two, entered the city and the first roots and lianas can now be seen in the White Room of the Casa de Gobierno.
Santiago García Sáenz curiously enough, announced this extraordinary event, which combines a big city and the jungle living together, a hundred years ago. He described and depicted with remarkable accuracy and sensitivity an event that would occur in Buenos Aires a hundred years later.
The jungle of Misiones, containing the Jesuitical mission and all its inhabitants, lives together with the big city, which is still there.
This jungle is portrayed by García Sáenz as endowed with such immobility that you can guess its slow movement and you can learn, looking with attention, that the city of Buenos Aires will be like that in 2096.

Clorindo Testa
Buenos Aires, Marzo de 1996

Although we have gone through current post-modernity and we are ahead on the road to changing paradigms our culture still bears certain degrees of Cartesianism in sites where it should have been done away with. Isn't this so-called primitivism of Santiago García Sáenz telling us of a necessity to recover innocence, of a new dawn, of a pregnant Annunciation and also of a new time?
"Only religion has remained fresh; religion has remained simple. only you, Christianity, are not old in Europe." wrote Apolinaire before 1913. That original freshness, this real newness is not but different aspects of the same question not yet clearly known. The silent insistence of García Sáenz all throughout his career seem to converge at one point with the intentions of the French avant gardists. However, even now, in an epoch of post-history art, its meaning has not been completely decoded yet.

Mercedes Casanegra
Buenos Aires, Mayo de 2003

Impression veritable are the words Proust used to describe the experience of someone who, waking up, looks through the window and sees a bright strip that cannot identify as the sea or the sky, but lives such experience intensely, without knowing to what extent it depends on the presence of the thing that causes it or on his memories. The paintings by Santiago García Sáenz, to a great extent, work in a similar way. Because García Sáenz paints, from memory, a lost time that does not supply any details but opens mute onto vast skies, in colors non vibrant and vaporous that penetrate and engulf the image until they become thought.
Because García Sáenz's paintings, with their elegant austerity, repose on the revival of the office of painting, and conceive themselves as a sort of inquiry, a surgical instrument cutting the surface of the world. By means of syncretism, the union of religious imagery and jungle climates, madonnas and gauchos, García Sáenz has formulated a spirituality that impregnates --now and for ever-- the eternal dusks of a land that used to be considered the New World and ended up as hardly a remembrance.

María Gainza
Buenos Aires, Mayo de 2004

The young art of the eighties -after two decades marked by the famous "death of art" as well as by minimalism and conceptualism tendencies- has taken on a new attitude: more subjective, free and Dionysian. The freedom-loving forms of expression denote the discomfort of an artist facing a world of technology and rationality. It is thus possible to talk of an aesthetic founded on a return to the "ego", to the inner world.
The situation is confirmed when confronted with the work of Roberto Elía, Santiago García Sáenz and Cintia Levis on exhibition at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery (Florida 1000). Each presents an individual approach to this embracing phenomenon making use of the freedom of formulation that distinguishes young art.
García Sáenz develops complex scenes in which a great many characters and animals are involved in a wide array of scenes, ranging from trivial and everyday scenes to demonic scenes. Its matter is sheer and distinct, yet the painting is dominated by free gesture, it is the expressive touch. The painting seems to actually signify a vitality resulting from an erotic drive, the dynamism of barely contained emotions.

Jorge López Anaya
La Nación, Buenos Aires, Diciembre de 1984

Santiago García Saenz's art refers us, as only few contemporary plastic expressions can, to a profound cultural view of mestizo America. The syncretic mysticism of those Virgins blending in with Mother Earth (the Mother of all mothers); the weariness, the loneliness and the infinite pain embodied in his "Señor de los enfermos", (Master of the Sick) reflects popular devotion to the Christ of Humbleness and Patience; the pilgrims' crossing through natural or urban jungles -equalized in their stalking seduction-, conform a fresco of versatile richness, as vital as the reality it reinterprets yet, at the same time, as unreachable as the magical nature of its origin.
As we mentioned before, the transparent religiousness of García Sáenz connects to the best of Latin American artistic tradition. His gaze is that of an avid -yet lucid- observer of the miracles he portrays.
The lighting that brightens tropical nights, the transcendental illuminations, the giddy apparitions, comfort and relieve us of an overbearing occidental omniscience, of each more and more imperfect

day, of the pathetic rationalism, to give us the gift, if only for one moment, of the perception of those hidden paradises of the emotional legend of our America: the paradises that arise from faith, from passion, from an exuberant collective memory.
The art that Santiago deploys before our eyes covers the stunning map of that collective memory. From the Valley of Anáhuac to the shores of the Río de la Plata, through the green Guaranian heart, the antique luxury of the American baroque relives with all its brilliance, excessive and sinister splendor. This is why his visions, although they occur in present-time, tell us of a past that continues to flow like a luminous river. And for this reason, they shed light upon our conscience with the unreal clarity of dreams. This is why his visions wrap around us like the imperceptible fog of a narcotic, making us lose track of time, hypnotizing us just like a lonely bonfire on the brink of the night would.

Alberto Petrina
Buenos Aires, Marzo de 1995

Santiago García Sáenz portrays himself brandishing a paintbrush and a cross. He sees himself as an artist, as an author. He accepts himself as a painter, as a gentleman. He has both a past and a present, a family and reminders. As well as memory.
The transformation of the meanings that his canvasses deploy recalls the impressions of the early years. They have been fixated on; inspiring a whole series of prints in which it is possible to relive the distant originality, the apparition of a supernatural image superimposed on the always arduous task of elaboration, fearful and tremulous, of the constitution of the ego. The constitution of a subjectivity that represents itself and the object of its perceptions, of its imagination. This double register is always important. Art, as we know, is one the most important mediations by which the artist is able to talk of him or herself. The sacred account by the painter is "his" account.
In the coming and going of achievements, the objective, pursued consciously, obsessively, acquires indisputable relevance. This can be appreciated in many canvases. It implies a transition, a journey that guides one's gaze to admire the birth of sense: the birth of the sacred infant. The journey tells of a meeting with the Other, it is the path towards oneself that, in the absolute need of the Other, suddenly suppresses all mediations to go directly to the Other.

Rosa María Ravera
Buenos Aires, Marzo de 2000

Santiago García Sáenz, a finalist in earlier editions (1991, 1993, and 1995), has now won the Fundación Fortabat Young Painting Award. He has tried to merge sacred history and everyday tales in his canvasses from a secular point of view that excludes dogmatisms and with emotive sensibility tending to slide towards irony.

With a language that almost only consists of prints, vivid in its detailed yet free figuration, the artist opposes today's inhospitable and bulky world, symbolized by threatening, overloaded, lonely and distant urban centers to Nature's infinitude of trees, water courses, animals and skies. This opposition is not, however, Manichean: there are no allegations or moralizing teachings in García Saenz's canvases. Yet there is a permanent remission to the transcendence of the human being, which has been forgotten or discarded in our time. His art acquires the collective poetic imagination and the pictorial signification of a subtle, passionate message, which warns of the presence of great truths in small things and shares it with us.

Jorge Glusberg
Buenos Aires, Octubre 1997

As if he could sense that his time was up, around this time last year, he presented a book compiling paintings and autobiographical texts, titled Guardian Angel, Fifty Years of Sweet Company (Ángel de la Guarda, cincuenta años de dulce compañía). It was an unforgettable night at the Fernández Blanco Museum. He received the love of friends and the gratitude of collectors for interpreting nature so sublimely in his mystical paintings.
The sincerity of his oil paintings and the candor with which he painted the landscape, always reflecting his state of mind, forged a personal style which he let flow freely during his summers in Mar del Sur. His style merged his religious beliefs, his devotion and his love of the countryside with all naturalness.
Critic Damián Bayón defined him as a "Painter of the Pampas, apparitions, jungles and miracles". García Sáenz managed to disregard fashion and form and channel his art towards a very personal path, flooded with lyricism, just like the eastern Figari. In his urban landscapes, he idealized formality transforming it into a "Miltonian

paradise", the coming and going of the School of Medicine and the neighborhood of Plaza Houssay. He always said that his favorite workshop was a shed in the countryside. There, he would spread out the green jungles of Cochori, where he would find happiness in the freedom of galloping in the open on the canvas.
In 1997 he won the First place of the Fundación Fortabat Young Painting Award. In 2002, in acknowledgement of his work, he earned a scholarship from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (the National Arts Fund), the Palais de Glace and the Centro Cultural Recoleta, amongst other galleries. His work is exposed at the Medalla Milagrosa station of the Buenos Aires subway station.
García Sáenz seemed to be asking for forgiveness in his painting. His gratitude and complicity with the Guardian Angel, which had given him sweet company for 50 years, is proven in his art.

Alicia de Arteaga
Buenos Aires, La Nación

Clearly, the magnetic connections of the visual arts in the active zone of the contemporary garland obstruct the gaze to which the art public is accustomed. But the garland turns out to be a social added value if it intervenes in the assembly line. Bucolic scenes painted in a crushing manner, bathed in an aura of astral trail, for the comfortable journey of Jesus Christ's court, in contact with ineffable human beings incapable of an extravagant gesture, always in a state of strange satisfaction, as one would feel after a large lunch.
The comic presence of these figures and animals, plants and dreamlike clusters of ranches of many floors simulating an imperial urban center (an interruption of the specter we are accustomed to see on exhibition today) reminds us in a scholarly manner that the pictures are "hand painted". This is where Santiago's pictures commune. Hegemony of nature is the condition of his pictures, keeping equidistance with customs. The paintings accepted his devotion and irreligious acrylic lust; they rest inscrutable, guarding the scenes of the heavens and earth.

Renato Rita
Buenos Aires, La Nación, Mayo 2006

With Pope John Paul II

Santiago García Saenz with Amalia Fortabat

Mural in theSubway