Lot Essay
For over thirty years Tomás Sánchez has been engaged in a constant re-investigation of the significance of landscape as a major form of artistic expression. This genre may have been exhausted and drained of all meaning beyond stereotypical kitsch. Sánchez reinvests it with a new set of signifiers which, once decoded by the viewer, reveal a depth of implication and a vocabulary of symbols that may be understood as nothing less than subversive within the parameters of contemporary art. Sánchez's manipulation of the meanings of landscape is by no means a simple artistic retread. It represents a re-insertion into the language of the avant-garde of a visual morphology long considered antithetical to contemporaneity. In his work landscape takes on an entirely new significance, becoming a bridge between the representational and the conceptual. His paintings occupy a place within the interstices of visual expression. They summon up almost-forgotten places within our imaginations and give concrete form to a set of philosophical dilemmas and enigmas that would otherwise continue to reside in the realm of the abstract.
We are grateful to Prof. Edward Sullivan for his permission to excerpt the above paragraph from Tomas Sanchez, Skira, Milano, 2003, p. 11.
We are grateful to Prof. Edward Sullivan for his permission to excerpt the above paragraph from Tomas Sanchez, Skira, Milano, 2003, p. 11.