RECOMMENDED

A successful painter like Enrique Santana can really live anywhere in the world but, as it turns out, this Spaniard really loves Chicago. Maybe not so much the people (he’s never painted a single person) but the golden light as it falls on the shimmering urban canyons of steel and glass. He is just so poetic, Romantic poetic, thrilled by the austere loneliness of modern architecture, especially where it meets the water. Like any tourist, he must have taken one of those river-lake cruises back in 1991 when he first arrived in the city and then immediately decided that he was never going to leave. His paintings of buildings are magnificent, but so are his paintings of Lake Michigan—even when showing nothing but water—and even on one of those dull cloudy days when everything is just shades of gray. He’s one incredible painter and even more thrilling is the fact that he keeps getting better, giving himself more compositional challenges with volumes and light, and even tackling some interior views that would appear cold, antiseptic and lifeless anywhere outside of his designs. He’s one of the great painters of our time and he never went to art school. But what would a contemporary art school have to teach such a poet anyway? (Chris Miller)

Through November 20 at Ann Nathan Gallery, 212 W. Superior, (312)664-9392