200 × 170 cm, oil on canvas, 2021
Douglas Cantor (b. 1989, Puerto Boyaca, Colombia) lives and works in Glasgow, UK.
Cantor’s paintings are a biographical exploration of the self. His work is a collection of existential thoughts, phrases, memories, and experiences that create a vocabulary personal and specific to his own history — his Latin American heritage, his time spent away and his experience as an immigrant.
On the surface, Cantor's paintings often depict his most immediate context, with recurring motifs and subjects through which Cantor explores his painting process and where the act of painting is the driving force behind the decisions made. Underneath all this, Cantor's paintings are personal and private where, behind the interlacing layers of colour, snippets of text, and recurring motifs, lays the artist's personal exploration, depiction and conciliation of his feelings of segregation, his relationships, his experiences, realites and traumas.
Working from memory, Cantor ’s compositions are romantic, idealised, and often permeated with a heavy sense of nostalgia. The result is paintings that are of all things relevant to him: places, patterns, animals, people, still life, text, plants, and food, where each element works as a vessel for the artist’s thoughts, emotions, and unfolding identity.
