In Cassis, the pebbles, the fish,

the rocks seen with a magnifying glass,

the salt of the sea and the skies

They have made me forget human importance,

They have made me turn my back,

to the chaos of our adventures,

they have shown me eternity

in the light waves of the port

that are repeated without repeating themselves.

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Otto Wols

(1913-1951)

Perhaps it was the trees of "El Prado", the Montevideo neighborhood where Santiago spent his childhood, that left with their intertwined branches the pregnant image with which the artist builds his world today.

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Branches that in the alchemy of memory lost their particularity to become signs.

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Like the circles that form in calm waters when the last drops of rain fall, this primordial sign extends its echo, overlaps, expands and builds an endless number of mysterious links, which breathe and beat on the surface of the painting.

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In this abstract language, it is the color that sometimes brings distant figurative references, as in "Sunset over the Lake", where the symmetrical orange mass refers to the reflection of sunlight in the water, or in "Midday", in which that the black lattice suggests the branches of trees floating on a summer afternoon.

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The map, taken as an abstract representation of the links that make up our world, is sometimes the setting that Estellano chooses to display his sign and build an image with a marked influence of graphics, a fundamental part of his artistic training.

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Creator of powerful and subtle abstractions at the same time, contemporary "tachista", artist in short, who transforms the real into plastic images that manifest the vibrations of the spirit.

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Alejandra Roux,

March 2012

Buenos Aires, Argentina