Everything in the fascinating work of Santiago Cárdenas escapes preconception because everything in its evolution is novel. It is not only about his fruitful confluence between the classical and the modern, nor about his unmatched technical perfection, evident in the making of each painting, but about the obsessive effort to dissect color and light to reinvent objects and the human figure from a simple evocation, a fleeting reflection, which produces — as in a magic trick — the inevitable attraction of the viewer. The work of Santiago Cárdenas, exalted and acquired by the most respectable institutions of the contemporary plastic arts world, constitutes a poetic and novel pictorial order, which immerses us both in the realm of the trivial and the profound.