On the surface, Cantor's paintings often depict his most immediate context, with recurring motifs, familiar imagery, personal objects, daily life, close relationships and personal desires through which Cantor explores his painting process and where the act of painting is the driving force behind the decisions made.
Douglas Cantor, born in Puerto Boyaca, Colombia, lives and works in London, UK. Cantor’s paintings are an exploration of diaspora identity and the transfiguration of culture through the experience of the immigrant, specifically to Cantor, his experience as a Latino immigrant to the UK. His work is an attempt to try to come to terms with the ways his culture and identity have mutated through his experience of immigration. What it means to not belong here or there, fragmented lives and the discrepancies between the different realities of contrasting places, a specific set of circumstances and experiences all too familiar to the immigrant that seem to simultaneously strengthen and dilute what it means to him to be from somewhere else, somewhere past.
As a result, Cantor's paintings portray what is left, what is gone, and what has changed meaning. They show a version of Latin American culture that is specific to his reality and personality and act as a vehicle to both records as well as project the constant development of life. They remain romantic and idealized, wishful and hopeful. They preserve the dreamings of the immigrant in what may be a collective cultural version of the American dream, but in this case, his own.
On the surface, Cantor's paintings often depict his most immediate context, with recurring motifs, familiar imagery, personal objects, daily life, close relationships and personal desires through which Cantor explores his painting process and where the act of painting is the driving force behind the decisions made. Beneath this lies a much more personal, emotional, and private aspect of Cantor's works. An assortment of personal jokes that are perhaps even more prevalent in the titles, which are very carefully thought out, often coming from Cantor’s own writing. Here the paintings exist as a means to deal with life, a personal exploration, a depiction and conciliation of his feelings of segregation, his relationships, his experiences, realities and traumas.