Santiago Ribeiro lost four works valued at over €30,000 in California break-in, according to Portugal News.

Portuguese surrealist painter Santiago Ribeiro – an artist whose works hang in dozens of countries – is on the trail of four works stolen in a raid on the California home of colleague and fellow artist Shahla Rosa.

He is hoping that by publicising the works, they will be easier to recover.

Ribeiro, originally from Coimbra, is known in his milieu as the promoter of the largest surrealist exhibition of the 21st century, International Surrealism Now.

His work has been exhibited throughout the world and is popular with collectors. Each canvas sells for thousands of dollars, hence the value given to the total loss.

The paintings are already with the FBI’s ‘Art Crime Team’, but so far, there is no news.
Anyone with any information should contact the FBI Art Crime Team (https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us) or the San Juan Capistrano Police Services, using this email: Jolarson@ocsheriff.gov

The theft took place in San Juan Capistrano during the early part of July. The paintings concerned are the one in the main image, plus the following:

natasha.donn@portugalresident.com

About Santiago Ribeiro

Santiago Ribeiro was born in Coimbra, Portugal. In his interview to Portuguese American Journal, Santiago Ribeiro says that one day his father brought home 40 art books from the library, and he was amazed by illustrations of impressionist and surrealist art forms. Ribeiro states that his first art lesson was looking through these exciting books. Studying illustrations made him fell in love with the art and paintings. Ribeiro attended art classes at the Escola Avelar Brotero and Escola Superior de Educação of Coimbra but he dropped out of schools because he preferred to dedicate all his time to painting rather than going to classes. Santiago Ribeiro believes that he became a surrealist painter even before he knew what surrealism was. 

For Ribeiro surrealism is “absolute unlimited unrestrained freedom…Surrealist imagery draws from dreams and visions allowing the unconscious to express itself.”  Human behavior is the main topic of Ribeiro’s paintings. Most of his paintings were described as “complex compositions illustrating deep concerns about modern society and its individual and collective behavior.” This is how poet and writer António Arnaut characterizes Ribeiro’s paintings:”Painting of Santiago Ribeiro gives us the real and the inside out, the unreal and its semi- darkness, the movement and its hyperbole, like the taste of the sower that caresses the harvest. If the trait is surrealist what his paintings show us, in a fair balance of colors, is another reality, as if the figures that challenge us were our own shadows lifted from the depths of memory.”  Santiago Ribeiro is a founder of a project “International Surrealism Now”, which has promoted exhibits in over 30 countries. He collaborated with local artists worldwide and promoted events and exhibitions that included various artworks of sculpture, painting, photography and digital art.

Portuguese-American Journal