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daSein Asks｜Beatriz Santos

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Beatriz Santos

Born in 1996, Lisbon, Portugal, currently lives and works in London. As a multimedia artist, Beatriz Santos' s work draws on the everyday and the emotions it evokes, exploring themes such as memory, intimacy, humor, sadness, and longing. Her works chal- lenges binary oppositions—fantasy and reality, interior and exterior, narrative and decoration, manual craft and intellectual art.

Recent exhibitions: Porphureos, Gallery daSein, Shenzhen (2025); The Poetics of Reconfiguration, A26 Space, Beijing (2025); Journey (Solo exhibition), Spring Up Gallery, London; Slade School of Fine Art 2024 MA/MFA Degree Show, Slade School of Fine Art, London (2024); Filthy Fox Club Auction VI, Sarah Kravitz Gallery, London (2024) and Drawing In // Drawing Out, hARTSlane Gallery, London (2021) etc.

Beatriz Santos is the winner of the 2023 Richard Ford Award and the 2024 Dolbey Travel Award. Her work will be featured at ArtULTRA during the London Art Fair in January 2025.

"Porphureos" installation view, 2025

Q - Gallery daSein

A - Beatriz Santos

Q: What has motivated each of your choices, from English language to art history and then to painting as a profession

A: I don’t come from a family with a background in the arts, but my mother always loved reading novels and visiting museums. Ever since childhood I have been creative - but I could never decide what to focus my energies on! At school, I was most gifted at literature, and I had a very inspiring teacher who motivated me to apply for university to study English. I ended up specialising in contemporary British and medieval Italian poetry, whilst exploring the possibility of being a classical singer. Later on, I realised that I wanted to work in museums rather than be a musician, so I studied a year of Art History. Upon graduating in 2020, Covid-19 hit, and museums were laying staff off and not hiring anyone new. The strange temporality and difficulties of quarantining in London led me to rent a studio and begin painting, something I hadn’t done since I was sixteen. This way I could legally leave my home and go to my studio, which was my place of work. The more time I spent painting, the more I fell in love with it, and decided that this path was the one best suited to me!

Q: What impact have your diverse learning experiences had on your creations?

A: I think every artist is formed differently because of their unique life experiences, memories and socio-cultural background. My diverse academic background has meant I have tutored English and Art History to fund my painting degree and materials for my artistic practice. Economically, it’s been helpful and has made my artistic practice possible. On a deeper level, my degree in literature has made me confident in writing, and I often write poetry as a way to distill personal memories to use as inspiration for visual compositions. I think art history has been a treasure-trove for me: I’m always reading about and looking at the work of older painters, copying from them and trying to understand how meaning can be transmitted through the material application of paint.

Studying 16th-century Timurid illustrated manuscripts influenced my own use of narrative and isometric perspective in painting. Art historical research continues to inspire me: I recently read an autobiography of Goya, a celebrated Spanish Enlightenment painter, who declared in the Madrid Academy: “there are no rules in painting!”. I love how art history is often full of rule-breaking, shock and drama. I try to embrace this spirit of play and experimentation as an artist.

Ibrahim's (Abraham's) sacrifice

Timurid Anthology, Shiraz, 1410-1411

?Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon

Q：What is the source of your creative inspiration?

A: In my own lived experience! I live my life always on the look-out for great moments, powerful inner feelings, or beautiful scenes that would make engaging compositions. Every morning I get on my bike to go to the studio, and I start imagining what colours I would mix to make the colour of the sky and the road and the trees. It’s a completely natural impulse for me - so now I don’t fight it and I let the inspiration work through me. I also often write poems to capture a memory so I can paint it later on if I’m busy.

Achoooo!:

oil on canvas, 80 x 50 cm, 2024

Q: What is the significance of the different decorations in your work? How did you develop such a creative habit, and how do you decide on the final presentation？

A: In very simple terms, my paintings represent my lived experience, and the decorative elements represent my desires and fantasies or a particular material reality associated with the memory. For example, in The Catch-Up, the painting shows two women having an intimate conversation on a bed, but the paper-mache roundels at the top and bottom represent the conversation, as if they were little speech-bubbles or sentences strung together. Or in My sisters and I walking home as schoolgirls, the Kipling monkey keychains represent the three of us with our Kipling school bags, looking up at a building on a winter afternoon. The decorative elements should be surprising but should always have a deeper symbolic resonance with the painting. To my mind, they have a certain poetic logic that is not immediately apparent.

My sisters and I walking home as schoolgirls

oil on canvas, 20 x 36 cm, 2024

The Catch-up

oil on canvas, acrylic, photo, paper pulp, 190 x 200 cm, 2024

Q: How do you interpret color?

A: I know the scientific meaning of colour which I learnt in Physics at school - how certain objects in the world emit or reflect certain frequencies of light that get picked up by the colour cones in our eyes. But as an oil painter, I understand colour as a material property of certain pigments - with their own particular chemical or mineral origins and cultural history. I love, for example, how ‘blue’ paint can be from copper silicates (like Egyptian blue and Han blue), lapis lazuli (ultramarine blue), clay (Mayan blue), to name just a few natural and synthetic blues ! Colour for me is linked with other properties in paint - like how shiny or transparent or opaque or deep a pigment is, which are qualities determined by how much oil the pigment particles need to be suspended in oil paint.

I also think of colour in terms of language, and how language doesn’t always accurately describe the variety of colours we see in the world. If colour is a continuum, why do we break it up into – for example- the colours of the rainbow ? These boundaries between colours as defined by language and culture are very interesting to me. Growing up between cultures, I’ve always treasured colour words that seemed uniquely English or Portuguese - like ‘velha rosa’ (faded pinky-red) or ‘hoary’ (grey speckled with white).

Lost Button

oil on canvas, paper collage, ound button, acrylic and paper collage on paper maché

30 x 20 cm, 2024

velha rosa

Q: What is the relationship between color and your works? What role does color play in your creative process?

A: Colour is seminal to my practice in terms of the intense, oneiric mood a single dominant colour can establish. I depict everyday scenes imbued with lyricism and dreaminess: colour is a key expressive tool for me. In three of the works I’m showing with da Sein, purple and pinks are the main colours that I use to build up my paintings evoking warmth, intimacy, and wonder. Picking an initial or principal colour really helps me begin to make a painting, as it grounds me in a specific temperature, moment or feeling. Colour is mysterious - its role goes beyond words and I often feel like describing it is out of reach. I think that colour is fascinating in terms of its relativity: when I place a certain colour on the canvas, it immediately acts relationally with the other colours already present. This means that the colours I mix on the palette often behave surprisingly when they get onto the painting: this is the life and vitality that colour injects into my work - surprising me and inspiring me to respond with further marks.

Night walk to the cinema

oil on canvas, 160 x 160 cm, 2024

Q: Are there any artists you admire or have been influenced by?

A: Honestly - so many! I think I have been influenced by countless artists, both contemporary and historical, and the important ones change with every change and development in my life. I think my all-time favourites are: Rembrandt, Goya and Charlotte Solomon. At the moment, I really love: Katsushika ōi, Ana Maria Pacheco, and Chagall. I also admire craft traditions, particularly Chinese porcelain and Portuguese tilework, which are wonderfully globalised and fluid.

Charlotte Solomom

Life? or Theater?

gouache, 32.5 × 25 cm, 1940- 1942

?Fodor Museum, Amsterdam

Ana Maria Pacheco

Remember

2022

? Ana Maria Pacheco

Q：What are your interests beyond your artistic practice?

A: I love watching films, which has led me to make my first video piece wharf warble this year at a residency in London. I work in a cinema, so I see films two to three times a week for free. I love watching films from all eras and from all over the world and think it’s probably my favourite artform after painting - so immersive and emotive. I also really enjoy sports - since it’s crucial for me to keep my body healthy as a painter. I’ve been cycling a lot - and I’m hoping to do so even more now that the rainy, cold British winter is nearly over!

wharf warble

Q: Can you recommend a movie or a book that you like?

A: Mahanagar by Satyajit Ray - a perfect movie and Madhabi Mukherjee is an incredible lead actor as Arati, a housewife in Calcutta who decides to go to work (it’s an economic necessity) and seize control of her life. I love the humanistic depth of Ray’s characters, the effortlessness of his cinematography, and the depiction of ordinary, relatable struggle.