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


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