Gallery picks: Santiago de Paoli and Santiago Mostyn

At Jocelyn Wolff and Abraham & Wolff, Santiago de Paoli shows large-scale paintings in which bodies and faces seem pushed to a breaking point. For artists and drawing enthusiasts, the interest lies in how scale, paint handling, pose and contour work together to produce a human presence that feels both forceful and fragile.

The exhibition summary describes the works as transgressive. That points to a painterly practice that does more than depict: it tests what a body can reveal, endure or narrate, and it raises practical questions of craft—framing, gesture, density, and the use of empty space.

At Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Santiago Mostyn presents an installation centered on the history of the island of Grenada. Here too, the subject matters less as a label than as a way into how an artwork can arrange traces, materials or narratives so that a specific memory comes into view, with the exhibition space itself acting as a tool for editing and staging.

Placed side by side, the two projects show how painting and installation can both shape presences, histories and tensions that do not appear all at once. For artists, they offer two distinct ways of thinking about the gaze: one rooted in the painted figure, the other in the spatial construction of a story.