Orilla

“I’ve never rationally said to myself ‘I’m going to paint a Cuban landscape,’” Sánchez says. Yet landscape has served as the conceptual touchstone of his practice since the 1970s, when he began to paint first “what [he] could see from the window of [his] house” and, more suggestively, the grounds of the Isla de la Juventud, off Cuba’s southern coast. A counter to the “tourist landscapes with their picturesque scenes of the huts, oxen, royal palms, etc.,” his hyperrealist paintings carry forward the vanguardia tradition charted by artists like Carlos Enríquez and Amela Peláez, thoughtfully imbricating the natural and national worlds (quoted in E. Sullivan, “Interview with Tomás Sánchez,” Tomás Sánchez, Milan, 2003, p. 18). Sánchez rose to prominence in the early 1980s as a member of Cuba’s Volumen Uno generation, and he participated in the paradigmatic, early editions of Havana’s Bienal during that decade.

Landscape has long acted as a referendum on his relationship to nature—once in Cuba and now in Costa Rica and Miami—and, more philosophically, as the key to a self-actualized state of being. A shimmering body of water stretches across the foreground of Orilla, its surface a reflection of the pellucid sky and the dense forest of palm and ceiba trees that line the shore. “I like to meditate before the landscape,” Sánchez explains. “That gives me a different perspective when I finally sit down to paint one. While other painters begin by intellectualizing nature, I think of myself as recreating it” (ibid., p. 19).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park