Armando Santa Ana's paintings represent new words in the Spanish Language, words made into color and form. He is dedicated to create humorous words through phonetic recombination. He paints his verbal jokes with a peculiar mixed technique using oil, sand, acrylic resin and mineral dust. Santa Ana’s work reminisces the ancestral Mesoamerican three-dimensional bass reliefs, carved in stone with radiant colors. In his paintings, there is a juncture of sculpture and writing, solar light with stone, sound with color, image with word. Each painting represents not only a new word, but also a specific sound of the Spanish Language.
Santa Ana has painted 260 sounds to form a ritual calendar and has 400 more sounds in sketches. With all that, he has created a writing system much like those of the ancient cultures of Mexico, with their incredible pre-Columbian theory of image and text. In doing this, Santa Ana has created a pattern form and a working system for the preservation and enrichment of native languages of the American Continent, which are threatened to fall into ruins. Only in the United States and Canada, linguists believe about 90% of native languages will be lost before fifty years. With each lost lenguage, the world loses a spiritual and material treasure; a cosmovision, a form to see and to understand the Universe.
Armando has come to Ithaca trying to make contact with the people of the Six Nations and to contribute to create their own system of Ondonaga writing or Tuscarora writing, or Iroquois writing, or Seneca writing, or Cayuga writing, parting from their own cosmovision (their vision and understanding of the whole cosmos); because it is very likely that in the future, these systems will be the base of the new digital codes of cyber communication.