Mientras tanto “in the meantime” precisely describes this particular experience of time. Meanwhile, someone is fishing. Someone is drinking tea. Someone waits, works, sits down or carries out a familiar task. Nothing spectacular happens. And yet, something is taking place.
Santiago does not seek to turn these scenes into narratives. His figures are not there to tell a story, but to open up a pictorial space. The subject does not need to be exceptional: it serves as a point of departure, a familiar form through which painting can unfold freely.
A figure, an object or a posture gradually rises to the surface of the canvas. These elements emerge like pockets of figuration within a painting that never attempts to resolve everything. The eye moves between almost abstract areas and fragments of reality rendered with greater precision, as though the painting were reproducing the very movement of attention: first wandering, then suddenly arrested by a detail.
This approach freely reactivates the history of painting. It recalls the dignity once accorded to genre scenes, while also revealing a deeply contemporary understanding of the painted surface. Santiago neither quotes tradition nor reenacts it. He treats it as an available language, one that can be fragmented, displaced and made alive again.
The tension between the humility of the subject and the intensity of its presence runs deeply through the history of Spanish painting. In Velázquez’s bodegones, a woman cooking eggs, a man serving water or a few figures gathered around a table acquire a gravity that seems to exceed the action being depicted. In Zurbarán’s work, both figures and objects appear removed from the passage of time, isolated by light and placed within silence. Later, in Goya’s paintings, the figure often emerges without the surrounding space ever being fully defined, as though it were less settled within the image than momentarily brought into view.
Santiago’s work adopts neither the compositions nor the codes of these painters. Yet it shares with them a similar economy of narrative and the same confidence in painting’s own power. Everyday life is not treated as an inferior subject that needs to be ennobled: it already possesses its own dignity, depth and mystery.
Literature offers another way of understanding this shift in attention. Through his notion of the “infra-ordinaire,” Georges Perec invites us to question what repeats itself, what appears self-evident, and everything that usually remains below the threshold of the event. Rather than focusing on what disrupts the course of life, he turns towards what constitutes it: habits, objects, movements and rhythms that are so familiar that they eventually become invisible.
In Santiago Martínez Peral’s work, this attention to minor gestures finds its equivalent in painting. Drinking tea, waiting, fishing or simply being together are not fragments of a story to be reconstructed. These actions become the points from which a pictorial experience emerges. Material, colour and texture momentarily detach them from their banality, while keeping them at the edge of indeterminacy. Like a sentence that suspends an action in order to make its duration perceptible, the painting slows down the gaze. It does not turn the ordinary into a spectacle: it reveals the silent intensity that already belongs to it.
The ordinary does not become extraordinary. It is simply restored to our perception. These scenes have always been there, taking place mientras tanto. Sometimes, all it takes is for painting to make us look at them again.
