Greg Santos employs video and photography to create stunning, light-filled paintings that transfix the viewer. His recent body of work depicts improbable scenes of staged peril and extravagant disaster. The paintings focus on subjects in direct proximity to injury and death. Recent images include a man ruthlessly carrying his infant son by one arm, a horse dangling upside down from a steel train trellis, and an indistinct, black form clinging to the face of a glass skyscraper.

The experience is disconcerting. Although the situations depicted are incredible, they feel strangely familiar. This unnerving effect draws the viewer in, and compels them to contemplate subjects on the brink of devastation.
Working from his own photographs of the television screen, Santos deal directly with contemporary perceptual experience. The results of these investigations are beautiful images of intimate proportion that emulate the transience of video and photography, while retaining the materiality of paint. The works are created by layering thin glazes of oil paint to create luminous, translucent surfaces. Closer inspection reveals gossamer figures interlaced to create an elusive and incandescent abstract field. Yet from the slightest distance, they coalesce into a recognizable whole.
These descriptions allude to the tenets of Impressionism, but Santos does not carry on the traditional study of natural light and shadow.Instead, he focuses on representations of the electric light that emanates from the TV screen, a phenomena we are all intimately and psychologically connected to.