The Gesture is the Prayer

Carina Santos

“The Gesture is the Prayer” is a series of paintings I created after leaving full-time employment. It wasn’t a decision necessitated by a burgeoning art practice or one that was made because a more lucrative offer was on the table. I knew I really wasn’t doing well in that particular environment when I started having to self-soothe and deal with my raging emotions with medication I was taking more frequently, more than I ever had before. It felt increasingly unsustainable to keep living my life in that way, and I knew that, ultimately, it was the right thing to leave despite not having a plan in place.

This series of work is the aftermath of that decision. Although my mental health is better in some ways, the precarity of my situation brings about a host of different stressors. The cost of living in the U.K. is on a rapid incline, and the job market has worsened. It is a different kind of drain to constantly have to prove yourself in a place that has no context of who you are or what you have accomplished somewhere else.

Painting these was a communion of sorts. Each gesture and stroke was impulsive and visceral, the trace of my roiling feelings and marks of both hope and despair. From coming into work surrounded by my colleagues for eight hours every Monday to Friday, I was left alone in my studio, painting to music interrupted by ads on Spotify as I was ejected from the family plan my brother was paying for, on account of being located elsewhere. Artist Barnett Newman looked at abstraction as a language, particularly one that has potential to speak to metaphysical and spiritual themes. I began to approach my work in this way, too.

This body of work is a journal entry, documenting the time that I’m still living out today — a confusing mix of relief and trepidation, where the tough decision remains the correct one. These gestures are expressions of uncertainty, with the requirement of embodying self-confidence in the face of losing any sort of self-belief, as well as of the conviction that there is something better out there that doesn’t require losing myself in the process.

Working on these, I look at the gesture as prayer, lifting everything up to someone who might answer them.