Samanta Tello
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(415) 377-6120
ARTIST STATEMENT
“With a love for minimalism, I approach my work as an homage to everyday human sensitivity, resilience, and strength while developing my designs as a simplified visual story. Through the figures in my work, I intend to portray a serene assertiveness that comes from letting go and living in the present while inviting the viewer to delve deeper into the nuance of the compositions.
My work seeks a dialogue between opposites — positive and negative space, light and shadow, color, texture, patterns, and contrasting materials like wood and metal leaf. I use pyrography to burn my designs onto wood panels, forging a connection to nature and the human spirit. The dance between the wood and the burning technique becomes more profound by applying wood stains and allowing the natural grain to emerge with a mix of a controlled and unexpected outcome in a process that, to me, feels like silent poetry.”
BIO
Samanta Tello was born in Barcelona and raised in Madrid. Her passion for art and graphic design led her to study Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2001, she moved to San Francisco, where she still lives, returning to Spain regularly to reconnect with her roots.
Tello’s work has been featured by the De Young Museum at The De Young Open exhibition in San Francisco in 2020 and 2023 (on display until January 2024). She painted one of the Hearts of San Francisco 400-pound sculptures and was featured twice in the SFMOMA Tumblr. The Sorbonne University of Paris used one of her pieces as the collateral for a conference on Epistemic injustices. The same piece, Silenced Voices of Everyday Sheroes, has won the So To Speak Feminist Journal of Language and Art award and was featured in Yale Insights Magazine.
