Pace Prints is pleased to announce Future Flora, an exhibition of new unique works by Santi Moix, on view September 6 – October 5, 2024, at 536 West 22nd Street. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, September 5, 6–8pm.

Moix’s monoprints are suffused with life. Plush blooms and threads of dots tangle on the paper, often exploding radially from the center or lying evenly in saturated swathes. Crowding the flowers’ stems are little emblems from the artist’s “pictionary,” a term coined to describe his idiosyncratic lexicon of figurines – some abstract, some insect-like, some botanical, and all unique. In Future Flora 18, they are unusually spaced out and sprawling, like organisms under a microscope. The prints’ explosive and rhythmic qualities draw from previous bodies of work, Hanabi (2019), inspired by the Japanese firework festival in Nagaoka; and The Ripplings (2012), named for the effect Moix identified with the spontaneous layering of silkscreens. Future Flora continues to delve into themes of beauty and ephemerality by affixing several temporalities at once. While teeming with life, Future Flora does not shy from mortality. Framed with black blooms and barbed leaves, the otherwise tropical netting of flowers in Future Flora 3 provides a glimpse into a destructive future. Several of the works feature a blue drooping flower, whose downturned face lends to a personified melancholy. The addition of such motifs makes the works otherworldly and all encompassing, like the dark cloud in Future Flora 1 which evades any distinction as to whether it is the origin or the end. The evanescence of Moix’s subject matter is also reflected in his process. To make each unique work, Moix drew and painted directly on mylar and vinyl sheets with watercolor pencils, oil pastels, and watercolor before placing a sheet of paper on top and sending it through the printing press. The matrix can only produce a single intact impression, as the tons of pressure applied by the press lifts the paint and pastel from the vinyl while fixing it onto the paper. It is a spontaneous moment of creation and destruction, echoing the eruptions of flowers that each depicts.