Norlan Santana, who has been devoted to plastic art almost a decade, has demonstrated that he is a fast process of artistic maturing, and an intense and continuous transformation. He introduced us into his art with "Autoretrato" (self-portrait) in which a strong primitivistic concept is observed, a distinction of color is made, and an insight into his future works is given.
Then, the color , his next phase is a creative rush of colors, combined with spots, the suggested shapes that balance out the expressionism of his work, with a degree of simply informal abstraction, and then the lines and the curves that are shown even today in his canvasses, lines that are always moving and meeting themselves, without escaping reality. He also uses a richness of textures which give more realism to the elements, thus adding more strength to the colors-sea blue, blood red, earth other, gray sand- and he is always enhancing one element over another through the use of what could be a stroke, a color, a square or a line, in which the spatula is more prominent than the brush.
As an artist, he has continued to be critical of the social and cultural context of the Central American countries, and has enriched his works as a result of the rationality that defines each one of them, because even though they may looks similar, they are all different in one unique characteristic. In his Ocher phase he threw all his efforts into the origin-the creation-nature concept-in which color is simply soaked in his emotional phases with a sort of melancholy that is observed more clearly in his works of boats, of very primitive strokes, although they are wrapped up in a specific aura in his work Los dos BARCOS (The Two Boats) , where blue, the color of thought, begins with a light blue that gradually becomes blue, being this a gradual change from serenity to reflection, from independence and at the same time emotional dependence to the bond of a couple-the married couple-. The boat continues its dance by wandering in a sea of various contexts, textures, and elements of a freedom that is essential for his work.
In his murals, the main topic has been the urban context, in which ecology is respected, thus the eco-urban landscape, where monkeys are immersed in their green surroundings and they are learning to be neighbors of man, where lianas decorate the frame of a door or the sketch of a house, and more impact causes the observation of each work in these gigantic formats, whose dimensions suggest strength and prominence. In his conceptual stage, torsos and windows also take an important space of study, where the always perfect torsos accentuate the thick filling fiber of male silhouettes of sharply defined strokes. However natural weaknesses are pointed out to show man as an inferior being and elevate he woman to the level of a dominant and reproductive sensual symbol which is inherent to the poetry of color such as the orange of beautiful dawns and red dawns in the context of passion, of pronounced nipples, appealing again to the concept of mother goddess. The windows function as that repetitive critical eye, with a sense of alertness to what happens in the surroundings, where the human eye finds no limit to see the sky, the mountains, the sea, the guts of the earth and even the beat of a hear, longitudes and latitudes, from one single point of view-sensitivity.
Each work has its own purpose and context, there is done at random, but is not very intended, each work defines first and foremost, this emotional aspect in which the author is dying, and sailing, drowning and saving, the loss of the road, insecurity of a feeling or a conviction, each fragile line is a feeling that is bankruptcy, something that needs to be joined, something which only the eyes as meaning can reassemble, as a game, we began to see a line, curve and suddenly we lost or joins another ending in a way, as saying to love , there are villages where I miss, but I always find you, although I go by the edges always I will return to the Centre of what moves me, what it is this machine creations, our (the soul) interior engine.
Norlan Santana, with its prolific activity and rapid maturation, deservedly, has won a fixed on the walls of our memory, an artist that weigh space of crossing the ocean with her voice, not forgotten its Latin American reality commitment to lead as billowing, flags giving us that pleasant breath provide more and more artist that worry of create, imagine and transform a stroke, even for a moment, our realities.