Pejac

A painter from Santander who works in the street

Pejac was born in Santander, on the Cantabrian coast of northern Spain, in 1977, and his given name is Silvestre Santiago. He studied fine art first in Salamanca, then in Barcelona, and completed his training at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. That academic grounding sets him slightly apart from the artists he is usually filed beside, and it shows: he is fluent enough in the history of European painting to rebuild a Monet, a Delacroix or a Hokusai when a wall asks for it, and he makes knowing use of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Giacometti. Just as often he goes the other way and strips an image to a bare silhouette or a shadow, which is the register most of his outdoor work uses. He lived in Santander for years and now works from Madrid.

The poetic trick

The work depends on trompe l'oeil and on a viewer noticing something that was not there a moment ago. He draws in miniature on windows, scrapes paint off old walls so that the missing paint becomes the picture, and builds interventions for one specific place that would make no sense anywhere else. The subjects are consistently social and environmental: deforestation, pollution, drought, alienation, migration. In 2014 he painted three murals in the Uskudar district of Istanbul. The following year he worked at the Nuart festival in Stavanger, where his Scream answered Munch, and made pieces in Hong Kong and Tokyo. In 2016 he worked in Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, composing figures from scraped paint, including a tribute to Joaquin Sorolla. Later outdoor pieces put trees growing out of brickwork in Brooklyn and Chinatown in New York, and set a work adrift in the Atlantic off Cantabria. In 2020 he painted three murals for the Marques de Valdecilla University Hospital in his home city.

Exhibitions

His first major exhibition in the United Kingdom, Law of the Weakest, opened at the Londonewcastle Project Space in London in 2016 and ran for ten days, with thirty five works across oil on canvas, sculpture, installation, photography and drawing. He prepared for it on the street, scratching a reading of Van Gogh's Starry Night onto a new Jaguar as a comment on the Brexit vote, and hanging shoes upside down over lamp posts in Shoreditch for a series called Downside Up. A lenticular print of two hundred copies, Linea, was released on the opening night. In 2017 he took the Redemption Series to a two day pop up show at the Squero di San Trovaso in Venice, one of the oldest gondola boatyards in the city, working on the texture of pressed wood panels. In 2018 his self produced Waterline show occupied an old barge turned into a floating gallery on the Seine beside Notre Dame in Paris, presenting thirty studio drawings in charcoal and pencil; the print released that night, A Forest, ran to eighty copies, was sold by lottery, and the proceeds went to an environmental foundation.

At auction

His auction market is thin but real. At the Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr Discovery Sale in 2024, Iceberg, a pencil drawing on paper of 2017 signed and dated on the reverse and bought directly from the artist, made EUR 12,800 including premium.