PRESS RELEASE

Primary is proud to present What's Been Taken Remains, an exhibition of select paintings by Santiago Alexis Rubino, opening Saturday, February 14, 2026, and on view through March 14, 2026. This marks the artist's first solo presentation with the gallery.

Eventually, everyone learns the cost of loving. Sometimes it arrives slowly, almost invisible. Other times it lands all at once. Occasionally, something is left behind—an object, a trace. More often, there is nothing at all. What remains is harder to name. It settles into the body. It bends time. It presses against what we think we can carry.

Santiago Alexis Rubino's paintings come from there, from inside that pressure. They are not about what happened, but about what persists. They offer a pause, a confrontation with what endures when the familiar collapses or quietly slips away. They move at the speed of lived experience, where loss and tenderness occupy the same space, and where what is fragile becomes formative.

Through layering, revision, and patient attention, the surfaces grow slowly. Light moves quietly, tracing form, weight, and presence without spectacle. Rubino's hand leaves evidence of care, of labor, of duration. These paintings are not meant for glancing; they are rooms—places where memory, time, and feeling gather, where you arrive and find something known has been moving inside you all along.

Opens Saturday, February 14, 2026 at 5 PM


Checklist Press Release

Santiago Alexis Rubino (b. 1979, Buenos Aires) is a self-taught, Miami-based artist whose practice is grounded in drawing. His works reveal a devotion to line, geometry, and form, carrying an intimacy that reflects both discipline and introspection. Rubino’s trajectory, shaped by a humble upbringing and a restless pursuit of knowledge outside traditional institutions, infuses his practice with a quiet resilience. Themes of memory, loss, and renewal run beneath the surface, giving his imagery its distinct emotional resonance. In recent years, Rubino has turned to oil painting, expanding his vocabulary into depth, light, and atmosphere. These paintings open new spaces of wonder and narrative, where the precision of draftsmanship meets the poetry of lived experience. Rubino has presented solo exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles; and Spinello Projects, Miami. His work has been shown across cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Mexico City, Toronto, and Miami, and is recognized for its singular visual language and evocative storytelling.

Primary (Est. 2007) is a context and research-driven curatorial collective with an emphasis on public art. We thrive amongst the self-taught, working-class misfits, who explore the margins of a new Americana through pungent, human-focused narratives. Our program engages with the raw and uncanny, celebrating border voices, bootleg culture, and intergenerational commentary, connecting the new and unseen with broader audiences and evolving collections.

For further information, please contact info@thisisprimary.com