Chilean artist Renato Órdenes San Martín has been creating a series of watercolor paintings since 2020 that are an exploration of material relationship and poetic resonance, shifting between real and imagined spaces. San Martín’s small works on paper feel massive, as if they have recorded an ecstatic psychic state or a paranormal event where pigment and water act as conduits. Painted in a vertical—sometimes symmetrical—format, repeated motifs of swirling sky forms hover over and into caves, mountains, and bodies of water. "I like the idea of seeing the world as a dream," San Martín writes, "a ruinous apparition, a specter, that withdraws from the reality I think I know and that in its journey leaves viscosities, traces, signs that I try to capture and translate."
San Martín received his master’s degree in Arts Education from UPLA and has a PhD in interdisciplinary studies. He is co-founder of Worm - Cantera de Arte, a space dedicated to contemporary visual arts in Valparaíso, Chile. He has exhibited extensively in Chile and internationally, with recent exhibitions at OMA Gallery in Santiago, Chile and Bark Gallery in Berlin, Germany. He currently works as a teaching artist at the UV School of Architecture, Arcos Professional Institute, PUCV Art Institute, and BBAA Viña del Mar School, teaching courses on form, spatial expression, art circuits, volume and space, and sculpture.