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Lot Essay
“I’ve never rationally said to myself ‘I’m going to paint a Cuban landscape,’” Sánchez says. Yet that selfsame 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 landscapes 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 I generation, and he participated in the paradigmatic early editions of the Havana Biennial. A steady and seemingly inexhaustible subject, landscape has long acted as a referendum on his relationship to nature—in Cuba as well as in Costa Rica, where he lives part of the time—and, more philosophically, as a key to a self-actualized state of being.
Sánchez was a student (and later a professor) at Cuba’s Escuela Nacional de Arte, and his formative years were profoundly shaped by his practice of Siddha yoga and meditation, which continue to inflect his approach to landscape. “I like to meditate before the landscape,” he 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.” His studies of Hindu religion eventually drew the censure of Cuban authorities, who frowned on transcendental spirituality as mere escapism from the mundane realities of the everyday world, and Sánchez left the Escuela in 1976 and the island itself in 1990. His naturalist vision nevertheless prevailed through an abiding spirituality—he acknowledges a kinship with the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and the American Hudson River School—and his sacred practice of meditation. “When I enter a state of meditation, it’s as if I’m in a jungle or a forest,” Sánchez reflects. “The mind enters into a great exhilarated state, like an exuberant jungle where you can experience fear, desire, anguish—all types of emotions and feelings” (ibid., pp. 19 and 22).
Sonido de nubes invites us into this interiorized jungle: towering palm and ceiba trees curve into an archway in the foreground, framing the meadow and dense forest that stretch into the distance. A low cloud hovers above the lush tree canopy, treating the lone seated figure—and implicitly, the viewer—to an extraordinary synaesthetic experience. The “sound of the clouds” reverberates silently in the mind’s eye as we imagine a complete state of enlightenment, or nirvana. “I look at landscape with a sense of reverence, but I feel totally included within it,” Sánchez once remarked. “What is inside is also outside. I feel as if I am outside looking at what is inside” (ibid., p. 19).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Sánchez was a student (and later a professor) at Cuba’s Escuela Nacional de Arte, and his formative years were profoundly shaped by his practice of Siddha yoga and meditation, which continue to inflect his approach to landscape. “I like to meditate before the landscape,” he 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.” His studies of Hindu religion eventually drew the censure of Cuban authorities, who frowned on transcendental spirituality as mere escapism from the mundane realities of the everyday world, and Sánchez left the Escuela in 1976 and the island itself in 1990. His naturalist vision nevertheless prevailed through an abiding spirituality—he acknowledges a kinship with the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and the American Hudson River School—and his sacred practice of meditation. “When I enter a state of meditation, it’s as if I’m in a jungle or a forest,” Sánchez reflects. “The mind enters into a great exhilarated state, like an exuberant jungle where you can experience fear, desire, anguish—all types of emotions and feelings” (ibid., pp. 19 and 22).
Sonido de nubes invites us into this interiorized jungle: towering palm and ceiba trees curve into an archway in the foreground, framing the meadow and dense forest that stretch into the distance. A low cloud hovers above the lush tree canopy, treating the lone seated figure—and implicitly, the viewer—to an extraordinary synaesthetic experience. The “sound of the clouds” reverberates silently in the mind’s eye as we imagine a complete state of enlightenment, or nirvana. “I look at landscape with a sense of reverence, but I feel totally included within it,” Sánchez once remarked. “What is inside is also outside. I feel as if I am outside looking at what is inside” (ibid., p. 19).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park