Cesar Santos, 1982 | Contemporary realism painter

Cesar Santos is a Cuban-born American painter, best known for images that transmit the impression of paintings of the past, but are also imbued with contemporary, fresh concepts and his own philosophy.

His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, Nineteenth Century academic work, and contemporary society.

His artistic energy drives him to arrange elusive figures and objects in conceptual designs, yet rendering them in a believable and convincing way.

Cesar Santos is a contemporary Cuban-American artist and portrait painter. He is better known for his body of work "Syncretism", a term he uses to describe paintings where he presents two or more art tendencies in aesthetic balance.

He has completed numerous commissions and his work is held in private as well as public collections around the world.

Santos' work has been displayed at the Annigoni Museum in Villa Bardini Florence, Beijing Museum in China, Museum of Contemporary Art in Sicily (MacS) and the National Gallery in Costa Rica.

Santos is part of the Living Masters' Gallery at the Art Renewal Center in Glenham.

Santos' work reflects both classical and modern interpretations within one painting; his work has been influenced by the Renaissance as well as Contemporary Art.

Forum MDC wrote of his work that "in an era in which technique is often an afterthought, Cesar Santos is a modern master who evocatively combines the classical and the contemporary in his paintings".

According to Santos, "the ultimate goal of his syncretic work is to establish a new painterly realm with its own defined characteristics; like any other legitimate process of evolution, it gains a foothold in the preceding stages until the assimilation of the opposing trends is expressed as a newly born and unified entity".

The influence of his contemporary training in the US and classic training in Florence is evident in his work, of which Western Art and Architecture wrote that "trained in both classical painting and contemporary art, painter Cesar Santos creates work with vivacity, opulent color and sensual figures to evoke both a unique perspective as well as a sense of irony".

While initially most of his work was on still life such as his painting Camera in 2008, humans and life-form became the focus of his work in the later years of his career depicted by his series Syncretism and subsequent work.

Miami Herald wrote in a review of The Artist's Accomplice that "Santos' process is a fluid one.

He tries new techniques and integrates any that help him work more effectively".

He works primary with oils on linen, which helps him in achieving what he calls a "neo-academic" technique.

Boston Globe wrote an article about a painting competition where Santos won the grand prize; the newspaper in part quoted him: "Like a poet will be able to write a sentence ... we have to be able to write what is in front of us visually", he said.

"[You] control your tools so that you can express your feelings".