Jenny Santi
GARDENS I NEVER KNEW
March 16th – 27th, 2026
Solo Exhibit curated by James Little
Across art history, beauty has often emerged in response to periods of strain, uncertainty, and rapid change. The natural world, in particular, has offered artists and viewers a steady source of grounding, from medieval books decorated with natural imagery to the atmospheric landscapes of the Impressionists. These works did not offer escape so much as coherence, a visual counterbalance to the pressures of their time. Over the twentieth century, this grounding impulse evolved as many artists moved away from direct description and toward simplified, distilled forms of nature, using rhythm, repetition, and structure to steady the psyche and create space for quiet attention.
Jenny Santi’s paintings take part in this longer tradition while speaking clearly in a contemporary voice. Her work translates the experience of nature into gesture, color, and form, focusing less on how nature looks and more on how it feels. While floral in spirit, the paintings do not follow the scientific or illustrative conventions of botanical depiction. Instead, they hold sensation, mood, and movement. The forms that surface in her work read as impressions and traces, as if carried from a landscape remembered through the body rather than observed at a distance. Gesture remains visible, and emotional states are allowed to shape the composition.
In a culture shaped by speed, digital saturation, and increasingly disembodied ways of relating, Santi’s use of nature offers a return to a slower, more intuitive way of knowing. By treating beauty as something lived and felt rather than purely decorative, her paintings invite viewers to pause, breathe, and stay with what they are seeing. In a world that often moves too quickly, the work offers a brief moment of calm awareness.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jenny Santi (b. Manila, Philippines) is a New York based Filipino artist whose painting practice explores beauty and the psychological experience of nature as imagined rather than lived. Working between abstraction and botanical suggestion, she creates gestural environments that emphasize atmosphere, sensation, and emotional resonance over representation. Her work is shaped by a lifelong relationship to dense urban environments, where encounters with nature were fleeting, fragmentary, and often mediated by distance.
Having lived almost exclusively in urban centers including Manhattan, Manila, London, and Singapore, Santi came to know gardens and green spaces through brief, passing encounters. These conditions inform her ongoing interest in nature as a grounding force, standing in quiet opposition to systems that treat the natural world primarily as something to be exploited for economic gain. Influenced by her background as a writer and psychotherapist, she describes painting as a ˝productive meditation, using organic forms and layered surfaces to explore how color, gesture, and rhythm can calm, hold, and affect the inner life. Beauty in her work is treated not as decoration, but as a stabilizing presence within contemporary experience.
Santiˇs multidisciplinary background informs both the structure and sensitivity of her practice. She holds an MBA from INSEAD and has worked across business, philanthropy, and mental health, experiences that sharpen her attention to process and emotional nuance. She trained at the Florence Academy of Art and the Art Students League of New York, where she studied contemporary nonobjective painting with James Little. Her work has received multiple Best in Show awards at the Leagueˇs student salons, has been featured on Artsy, and has been exhibited at the National Arts Club in New York City. Her paintings are held in various private collections, including that of Lionel Richie.
"I have spent my life in places where nature was not a landscape but a collection of fragments. A pot of flowers on a windowsill. A thin line of trees planted along a road darkened by exhaust. Vases filled with blooms that were already beginning to wilt. Bits of green pushing through cracks in the pavement. Nature felt contained and distant. Rarely was it something that enveloped me. More often, it was something I only glimpsed in passing on my way somewhere else. Because of this, the images I paint rise out of longing and imagination. They feel like a landscape I dreamed of but never fully knew."