Elías Santis is a visual artist with a Bachelor in Visual Arts from the Instituto Universitario Nacional de Arte of Buenos Aires.
Born in Buenos Aires to an Argentinean mother and a Chilean father, as a child, Elías used to play to create stories, later inventing for himself the story of being an artist. In 2000, he started following art studies at the Instituto Universitario Nacional de Arte in Buenos Aires, obtaining a degree in Visual Arts in 2004. In 2006, he moved to Santiago, Chile.
While Elías develops his work in different media, his artistic production focuses mainly on painting. Early in his career, his work dealt with the spiritual imaginary of magic realism, representing it through a hyperrealist approach. Influenced by the birth of his first child, Elías’s later work shifted to an expressionist aesthetic, exploring narrations evoking his ancestry, the essential and universal, through his story.
Currently, his artwork explores topics related to individual stories set in atmospheres in which a portal to the unknown is presented with dystopic and utopic, mysterious and pleasurable touches. This theme - which Elías names “The Limit of Light” - is carried through a pictorial proposal that mixes hyperrealist details with loose brushstrokes, with a strong presence of transparencies, shadows and lights. He expresses his enthusiasm searching for enigmas, creating bridges that bond material and immaterial worlds.
Elías has exhibited individually and collectively in Chile, Argentina, Germany and Italy, and his works are part of private and institutional collections in Chile, Argentina, France and Italy.
Elías Santis lives and works in Santiago.