GIACOMO SANTIAGO ROGADO

7th may - 30th July, 2026

EL CORAZÓN ES AGUA

Richeldis Fine Art presents EL CORAZÓN ES AGUA, a solo exhibition by Giacomo Santiago Rogado (b. 1979, Lucerne), a Swiss painter of Spanish-Italian origin whose work has, over more than two decades, developed a rigorous and expansive investigation into perception, pictorial space, and the conditions of seeing. Rogado has established a singular position within contemporary painting through a practice that moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, extending the medium into spatial and immersive installation.

At the core of Rogado’s practice is a process guided as much by material behaviour as by the artist’s hand. Working directly with the physical properties of paint, Rogado allows pigment to disperse, settle, and accumulate across raw canvas, creating compositions that emerge through a careful choreography of chance, rhythm, and restraint. The resulting forms hover between presence and dissolution - suggestive of atmosphere, landscape, shadow, or bodily trace, yet never fully fixed. His paintings unfold as perceptual fields, inviting a slow and shifting encounter in which image and abstraction continuously destabilise one another. Throughout the work there is a sense of continual movement - a fluid, almost tidal rhythm in which forms appear to drift, dissolve, and reform. This quality of flow reflects the artist’s process itself, where pigment, gravity, absorption, and time remain active participants in the formation of the image.

This new body of work marks a further distillation within the artist’s practice. More monochromatic and pared back in palette, the paintings reduce gesture and colour to their essential elements, pushing the abstraction towards an intensified sense of stillness and spatial ambiguity. Deep blacks, muted indigo tones, and saturated crimson emerge against luminous grounds, allowing the subtle movement of pigment and the tension between control and chance to become increasingly pronounced. The works possess a meditative clarity in which scale, silence, and material presence operate with quiet intensity. The exhibition also includes a monumental suspended painting positioned directly before the gallery window. Positioned in dialogue with the light behind it, the work reveals the translucency and internal structure of the painting itself. Hovering between image and object, surface and space, the work transforms the surrounding architecture into part of the composition. Here, Rogado extends painting beyond the wall and into an immersive spatial encounter in which light, atmosphere, and material presence become inseparable.

The exhibition includes four sculptural works from Rogado’s ongoing Observing Self and Time Capsule series. Composed of mirrored spheres and hourglass forms, the sculptures extend the artist’s investigation of perception, reflection, and consciousness into three dimensions. Their mirrored surfaces absorb the surrounding space while simultaneously implicating the viewer within the work itself, creating a tension between immersion and self-awareness. Echoing the conceptual sensibility of John Cage’s 4’33”, these works foreground attention and presence, heightening an awareness of space, duration, and the act of observation itself. Across Rogado’s practice, painting, sculpture, rhythm, and reflection operate as part of an evolving visual language - one that unfolds less as a fixed image than as a continuous state of movement, perception, and poetic resonance.

His work has been the subject of significant institutional exhibitions, most recently at Kunstmuseum Thun and Kunsthalle Göppingen, and has been presented in leading institutions including Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Helmhaus Zürich, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Kunsthaus Baselland, and Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana. Rogado is the recipient of the Swiss Art Award, the Manor Art Prize, and the Recognition Prize of the City of Lucerne, affirming his position as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Swiss painting.