I Want to Be Light and Remain is the first anthological show of work by Santiago García Sáenz (Buenos Aires, 1955–2006) to be held in an institutional setting since the time of his death. Known during his lifetime primarily as a religious and naive painter, we hope, with this exhibition, to turn around some past readings of his work. With the help of the passage of time, we will show a highly complex artist who, behind that intense religiosity fundamental to understanding the tensions and contradictions at play in his life and work, grappled in singular fashion with the major questions of his day.

The exhibition’s title is the title of a song composed by Daniel Reguera in 1963, shortly before the time of his death, and immortalized by Argentine singer Atahualpa Yupanqui. The verses “I don’t want to turn into a shadow, I want to be light and remain” were featured in García Sáenz’s solo show at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires in the year 2000. The phrase makes reference first to García Sáenz’s constant painterly interest in light: he would paint the canvas orange or yellow before working on the image so that light would shine through in his paintings, and he often depicted rays of light; and second to his ceaseless battle to live between light and darkness, to reconcile sexual desires and religiosity. “Wanting to be light and remain” also alludes to his need to transcend through his work: he knew that, as a person with HIV/AIDS, his life could come to an end at any moment.

This exhibition clusters García Sáenz’s work around a number of themes, some of them urgently in need of attention: the cultural explosion in Buenos Aires in the eighties; the search for a Latin American identity in his work; sexual intolerance and martyrization; HIV/AIDS in relation to his work; and nature as space of freedom, heeling, and redemption.