Kristof Santy Would Rather Trust Objective Reality than Reach for Eve’s Apple

Ravel reportedly called Boléro an “orchestral tissue without music.” It is a single melody passed between instruments for roughly 15 minutes over an unchanging snare rhythm, growing louder each time until it collapses. Kristof Santy took the title for his new solo exhibition at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels, which opened in September across all three of the gallery’s floors. The borrowing fits. A Santy painting may show a bottle, a basket of food or a bicycle, but each object matters less than the role it plays in the overall structure of a given work.

His subjects are generally modest and mundane. Through layering, repetition, careful detail and saturated color, they become strange and affecting. There is no plot, no larger context, no allegory waiting to be decoded. As the exhibition materials point out, “Santy approaches painting not as a vehicle for spectacle or commentary, but as a sustained act of attention.” He turns that attention on everything from ceramic chimney fragments and Sunday painters’ canvases to devotional statuettes, odds and ends from the flea market and the Flemish folk tales and customs he grew up with. In conversation, he is blunt about the fact that he would rather show that an apple can simply be an apple than drag in the one from Genesis, and he says he believes in objective reality, not fate. For him, the ordinary world is inherently beautiful; there’s no need to layer on symbolism or narrative.

Born in 1987, Santy worked in a factory before committing to art and taught himself most of what he knows. The factory shaped the work, though not in an obvious way. The group lunch breaks, the identical lunchboxes and the same sandwiches eaten every day left him convinced that life is largely repetition and boredom, even as something worth looking at hides inside both. The Ravel reference, in that sense, is an accurate description of how he sees.

His international breakthrough came in 2021, when his work was exhibited by dealer Thomas Serruys, and select pieces have since appeared in “Painting after Painting” at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, “F**klore” at ABBY in Kortrijk, “Trans Europa Express” at Kunsthaus NRW Aachen and “Animalia” at the Heidi Horten Collection in Vienna. The latter put his paintings in the same rooms as artworks by Picasso, Warhol, George Condo and Damien Hirst.

“BOLERO” is made up entirely of new work: paintings and drawings and, for the first time, three-dimensional pieces on copper plates. (For a painter so committed to flatness, the move into 3D objects is a development to watch.) Santy believes a work succeeds if it moves him when he finishes it, whatever anyone else thinks, though he was kind enough to open up to Observer anyway, about his life and career and why an object doesn’t have to become a symbol. What follows is our conversation, lightly edited.

You worked in a factory before you painted full-time. Factories are full of repeated, functional, unglamorous objects. Do you think that time changed what you consider worth looking at and recording on the canvas?

Yes, absolutely. But for me it is not only about the machines or the objects in the factory. My own job was repetitive, but the movements and actions of my fellow workers also consisted of continuous repetition. Take the breaks, for example. They always happened together, as a group. Everyone brought their own lunchbox and basically ate the same kind of sandwich every day. I also began to observe those kinds of small, everyday actions.

That continuous repetition has become a great source of inspiration for me. If you enlarge it, you realize that our entire life actually consists of a succession of repetition and boredom. And yet, precisely within that boredom, there is something that is difficult to describe. Perhaps even a certain beauty. You don’t have to turn boredom into a philosophical system to see beauty in it.

How have the subjects you’re drawn to changed over time?

Many of my subjects are still present and probably always will be. Some subjects may no longer be as prominent in our physical world, but the memory of them and the image I have of them in my mind are still vivid.

So, for me, a subject does not necessarily have to still be physically present in order to remain interesting. A memory or an image can in itself be enough to acquire meaning again.

You’ve said you’re not a storyteller, that you let the subject take the lead rather than imposing meaning on it. But flattened perspective, bold blocks of color, geometric edges are all choices with underlying significance. Why do you paint the way you do?

When I start a new work, there is actually almost never a predetermined narrative. There is first a shape, a color, an image. During the process of painting and drawing, that original form gradually changes into something that acquires meaning, because I think very associatively during the process.

That meaning or association is initially very personal. I also don’t feel that the outside world or the viewer necessarily has to be able to do anything with it. It does not all have to be explained or understood for me.

I paint very intuitively. I observe, process what I see and then apply it in my work. That is essentially my way of working. Perhaps there is also a contradiction there that is important to me: I can experience something very emotionally without necessarily having to give it a great meaning.

You’ve named Philip Guston, Jean Brusselmans and anonymous 19th-century folk painters as reference points—that’s a strange trio. Is there a throughline?

I think so. For me, Philip Guston and Jean Brusselmans are both painters who work strongly from the material and from feeling. They apply paint to the canvas in an almost poetic way, until an image eventually emerges. The painting process itself is important in this.

By 19th-century folk painters, I actually mean mainly popular prints, such as the “imagerie populaire.” These were cheap prints that were produced in large quantities, colored in and then sold to ordinary people. You could almost call it cheap art. What appeals to me about them, among other things, are the flat representations and the often very bright colors. There is little need for an illusionistic space. The image is simply there.

I also see a clear link with Jean Brusselmans, who was himself also inspired by such images and folk art. For me, the common thread therefore lies mainly in the way that image, color and paint can emerge without everything necessarily originating from a preconceived story.

People describe your work as feeling nostalgic, and I don’t disagree. If there’s no story, no narrative inherent, where is that feeling coming from?

Nostalgia is a sentimental longing or a wistful yearning for a romanticized past. I think it is something that exists within all of us. It does not necessarily lie in the subject itself, but in the associations we have built up around it. Take a fruit basket, for example. A fruit basket still exists today, but when I paint one, the image can simultaneously refer to the fruit baskets we know from 17th-century painting.

Even today, for example, we bring a fruit basket when we visit someone in the hospital. We give that fruit basket as a gesture of comfort, care or sympathy. It is essentially the same object, but the context and the meaning change over time. I find that interesting. The subjects themselves do not necessarily disappear. They simply change in meaning and continually evoke new associations. Perhaps it is precisely that layering of memory and association that makes an image feel nostalgic, without there necessarily having to be a story consciously embedded in it.

When you paint traditional themes or folk objects, you’re depicting something that carries centuries of meaning for other people. How do you translate the image without imbuing it with those particular narratives?

That is precisely the difficult thing about painting. It is very tempting and, in a way, also obvious to take all those meanings with you and let them flourish. Yet I find it more interesting to try to show that an apple can simply be an apple, and not necessarily the apple from the creation story.

As human beings, we very quickly want to lose ourselves in fantasy and meaning. Perhaps that is a form of escapism. I myself do not believe in fate. I believe in objective reality. In sobriety. An object does not always have to become a symbol for me. It can simply exist.

Do you find beauty in everyday things outside of painting?

Yes, beauty is present everywhere. I live in a city that is not exactly described as a charismatic city. There has been quite a lot of crime recently, and rather unattractive residential towers are being built everywhere. But precisely among all that disorder—that bric-à-brac—there is an enormous amount of beauty to be seen.

I see, for example, a great deal of beauty in analyzing human psychology. Observing and perceiving, both nature and people, is actually my favorite activity. I like to look at how people behave, how they move and how they relate to their surroundings.

Perhaps that is also the reason why the everyday so often returns in my work. I do not have to look far for something special. It is constantly there, if you are willing to look at it.

If someone stood in front of one of your still lifes and said, “this feels more real than the actual object,” would you take that as success?

I actually always feel very uncomfortable when someone says something about my work. I will even go further: I don’t really like it. It always makes me feel a little uncomfortable. For me, the success of a painting lies mainly in my own individual experience. The moment when I have finished the work myself is important. If the painting moves me at that moment, then for me it is successful.

That may sound contradictory to my sober attitude, but I think that is precisely where the interesting part lies for me. But again, I can experience something very emotionally without necessarily having to give it a great meaning.  Of course, it is nice when someone else experiences something in my work. I am genuinely happy for them. But it does not change my own experience of the painting.

Ultimately, the work has to be able to mean something to me, regardless of how someone else looks at it.

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