Tomás Sánchez: Traversing Multiple Pahts
By Edward J. Sullivan
Tomás Sánchez is best known as creator of spiritually and sensually charged tropical
landscapes. We are immediately transported to another realm when contemplating his forest,
rivers or waterfalls. There is not a notion of geographical specificity in Sánchez’s views of
nature although we intuit that the reminiscences of his native Cuba are never far from his
imagination. Sánchez’s work evoke a calm and restful atmosphere and they may be said to be
metaphors for the spiritual contemplation of nature. Meditation of nature form a very large
part of the imagination of Tomás Sánchez, a long-time practitioner of Siddha Yoga. Sánchez
evoke poignant spiritual presences in many of this landscapes. In a number of them a small
male figure stands or sits with his back to the viewer, serving as a witness to the scene and
evidencing the power of nature which, at any moment, could overtake the fragile human
existence to exert its inherent majesty. With these landscapes Sánchez has entered the
international discourse of the art world. He is widely collected and has shown his work in
many museum and gallery contexts in Europe, Latin America and the United States.
It would be a grave underestimation of the versatility of this artist’s talents to concentrate on
the landscapes alone. In viewing a large repertory of images by Tomás Sánchez, including
those from the earlier phases of his career, we are immediately made aware of the diverse
themes with which he has dealt since he first began showing his art publicly in the early
1970s. Sánchez is a product of fairly turbulent time in the development of modern Cuban art
and his subjects mirror, in a sense, the artistic struggles and dilemmas that faced artists in the
early post-revolutionary period.
Tomás Sánchez emerged from the art schools of Havana in the late 1960s, a period of intense
experimentation, not only with reference to subjects and styles but also with regard to the type
of artistic instruction given to budding talents. Sánchez began his serious artistic instruction at
the Escuela San Alejandro. Known previously as the Academia San Alejandro, this school
was one of the first officially sanctioned art schools to open in Latin America during the
colonial period. By the time that Sánchez was studying there San Alejandro had become
somewhat less experimental in its approach to teaching art. After a while the young artist
knew that the had to transfer to the more forward looking Escuela Nacional de Arte. It was
there that he encountered a personality that was of pivotal importance for shaping his later
approaches to art. Antonia Eiriz was a professor at the Escuela and by that timehad become
very well known as the creator of somber, menacing images that took the late phases of the
art of Francisco Goya and others painters of darkly mythical subjects as their points of
departure. Sánchez often refers in a conversation to the enormous impact that the art and
imagination of Antonia Eiriz had on his early work.
Indeed, when examining the extensive body of work by Sánchez from the late 1960s through
the mid-80s there is a strong expressionistic streak to his painting and drawing. This derives
in part from the intensity of his teacher’s work but also from his first-hand familiarity (by
means of publications; he did not travel abroad until the early 1980s) with that of certain old
masters of horror and fantasy, including Pieter Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch and Goya. More
modern masters also fed his vision and he acknowledges a debt to James Ensor and Eduard
Munch while, at the same time, approximating the heights of fantasy of other late 19th century
painters like Rodolphe Bresdin or Odilon Redon. In many of Sánchez’s paintings and
drawings of the late 1960`s and early 1970s the spirit of social criticism as embodied by
Honoré Daumier is also just below the surface.
These references to paint and print makers of the 19th century do not mean to imply any
archaism or atavism in the first works of Sánchez. There is in fact a remarkable feeling of
contemporaneity that can be observed in this character’s savage grotesqueries. This the work
of the young artist observing and responding to the positive and negative aspects of the
society of his time. There are numerous drawings that depict town squares or street corners
with people gathering in conversation. They are depicted as having bizarre proportions and
exaggerated features. These are unique products of a 1960s sensibility in Cuba. This was a
time of solidification of the positive aspects of the Cuban Revolution and the desire to project
an optimistic view of Cuban achievements amidst an international climate of both approval
from many European and Latin American neighbors and bitter sanctions from the United
States. The Nation was at the heart of rancorous dispute, which may be reflected in the works
of the young artist, just emerging from the state system of instruction.
The absurdist and nightmarish aspects of Sánchez’s art are most clearly present in those
works in which the painter utilizes figures from traditional religious iconography. Several
renditions of the Crucifixion, especially those painted in 1974, are strikingly dramatic and
approach the darkly grotesque pictures of Sánchez’s teacher Antonia Eiriz while embodying
the spirit of Grünewald’s emaciated and tortured Christ in the Isenheim Altarpiece. In this
rendition of the subject where the crucified Christ appears in the company of the two thieves,
a swooning Virgin Mary below the cross has been turned into something more resembling
one of De Kooning’s Women than the traditional figure of the mater dolorosa. Here Judas
dances with the devil and a host of preternatural birds add a sense of Jurassic dread to the
scene. In the early 1970s Sánchez began to do a series of paintings in which the image of the
Virgin Mary (specifically, the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, patroness of Cuba) appears,
often floating in the skies above her worshippers. Inevitably she is a grotesque, misshapen
figure, accompanied by raucous angels and screaming baby Jesus. Heaven and hell are
evoked in these paintings in equal measure. The messages are mixed and the ambiguities
leave the viewer in a state of constant fascination. Even in some of this expressionist
paintings and drawings landscape starts to appear as a visual protagonist of the scene. The
artist has stated that even as a child he was fascinated by the vegetation he observed from the
back door of his own house in a rural area of the province of Cienfuegos. In some of the
examples of the Virgen del Cobre pictures nature appears as agitated as the human
participants in the drama. Gnarled palms give way to clouds that are more stylized, hard-edge
and serrate rather than puffy.
The 1970s was a problematic decade for the arts in Cuba. The art school such as the Escuela
Nacional (where Sánchez had become professor of Litography) and other institutions felt the
impact of a Soviet system of art instruction, which, as the artist states in the interview
included here, tended to stifle many of the aspects of creativity that had been fostered in the
previous decade. This was also a moment of political purges in others sectors of the art and
cultural worlds and many who did not represent an orthodox view of the system were
ostracized and could not practice their art. Perhaps the tensions of this period made the
experimentation of the early years of the 1980s all the more poignant and dramatic.
In the visual arts the exhibition entitled Volumen I organized in January 1981 at the Centro de
Arte San Rafael in Havana is still considered a watershed event and marked a new phase in
the history of contemporary Cuban art. Volumen I included the works of artist who would be
considered as representing the forefront of the Cuban vanguard for the rest of the decade: José
Bedia, Rubén Torres Llorca, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Gustavo Pérez Monzón, among others.
There was no coherent style that dominated. Instead there was an evident anxiety to express
freedom from any prior aesthetic or thematic constraints. The artists involved in the Volumen
I project opened the way for a continuing dialogue with experimental forms in Cuban art.
They took artistic liberalism, which for the most part had dominated the development of
culture and aesthetics in the revolutionary period, to another level. (Cuban art, for example,
had never experienced the rise of a type of dogmatic social realism that had been a hallmark
of mid-twentieth century official Soviet art). Many of these artists,a s well as others of the
1980s generation, would continue to develop in the area of Conceptual Art, while others (such
as Gory, Flabio Garciandía and, to a certain extent, Sánchez himself) took their cues at that
time from photo-realism.
Sánchez has remarked that the situation of being a painter of landscapes and, at the same time
a participant in the rising vanguard of Cuban art of the early 1980s, seemed to be something
of an anomaly. Landscape was considered by manty to represent a tradition-bound art form,
reminiscent of the 19th century Romantic artists who celebrated the beaches, the royal palms
and the peasant huts of another era in Cuban history. However, Sánchez’s landscapes spring
from a very different sensibility. Far from the picture postcard images of the late Romantics
or the tourist snapshots of stereotypical scenes, these paintings emerging from Sànchez’s
imagination in the late 1970s, were directly linked to the artist’s own sensibility of dissidence.
Tomás Sánchez provoked the ire of some Cuban authorities at this time not with antigovernment political statements or activities but with his practice of mediation and yoga. In
his case spirituality was a means not to exit from the mundane realities that surrounded him
but to connect more directly and intensely with human existence, nature and its essential
characteristics. He claims to have become more aware of the circumstances of life both on a
metaphysical as well as a temporal level through yoga. In his work, Sánchez has evoked both
the poetic qualities of nature as well as the debase realities of man’s confrontation and misuse of the environment in his paintings that depict trash strewn throughout a pristine natural
setting. This ongoing series of works, which the artist began to do in the mid-1980s, creates a
powerful suggestion of the ravages of greed and a misplaced sense of entitlement on the part
of humans in their confrontation with nature. The defilement of the landscape is a metaphor
of both human’s fall from grace and our denigration of the gifts that nature has provided. His
depictions of trash represent a merging of Sánchez’s idyllic landscapes with willful neglect
and destruction. The garbage paintings were initially inspired, as the artist states, by the
practice, instituted in Havana, of allowing people to put onto the streets of the city mounds of
trash, including unwanted furniture and other household goods to be hauled away. Later, in
his travels to Mexico, he began to observe huge fields of waste things both biodegradable as
well as the more permanent vestiges of the squandering of commercial abundance. These
paintings continue to play a trenchant role in the ongoing dialogue on ecology and the need to
preserve the fruits of natural abundance.
In the interview in this volume the artist mentions the significance to his career of winning the
Joan Miró competition for drawing in 1980. It was unusual, he states, for a landscape to be
awarded first prize since landscape is generally associated with a more retrograde artistic
imagination. However, it may be more productive to imagine that the judges of this
competition (all highly important members of the Catalan intelligentsia) realized the
essentially radical nature of Sánchez’s contribution. In him they saw an artist who, by going
against the grain of conventionally “experimental” art, gave radical new life to an ancient
genre of art.
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
exhausted and drained of all meaning beyond stereotypical kitsch. Sánchez reinvest 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 avantgarde 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.
There are certain persistent themes in the landscapes of Tomás Sánchez (who now lives
between South Florida and Costa Rica, with frequent trips to Cuba). One pf the most
persuasive is that of water: rivers, lakes, seas. These bodies are sometimes observed form
above, as if from a plane or a satellite. At other time the viewer engages directly with the
bodies of water, literally entering them trough a path cut into the dense foliage that inevitably
surrounds them. The artist has discussed his depictions of water in philosophical terms,
relating them to representations of certain states of awareness reached through meditation.
They may also be described as recalling the initial phase of the Cuban Revolution, when
many news reservoirs and artificial lakes were created throughout the country. In Sánchez’s
landscapes there are constant intersections of inner reality and concrete specificity. The artist
has stated that he does not seek to evoke particular places or moments of universal thruths
grow from the memories of tangible realities.
Sánchez has cited the work of several earlier masters of landscape of the past as partial
sources of his visual imagination. They include the members of the Hudson River School,
especially Frederick Edwin Church as well as Albert Bierdstadt, creator of panoramic views
of the American west. With German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich Sánchez shares
an engagement with the transcendental values of nature in a sometimes much –transformed
sense. Neither artist is interested in an exact rendering of geographical or geological facts or
phenomena.
Both are able to infuse their paintings with a spiritual force they may be the salient
characteristic of their work as a whole. In more contemporary terms, there are affinities, if not
direct parallels, between Sánchez landscapes and those or Nicaraguan artist Armando
Morales. Morales’ dense jungles, one of his most well known themes, carry with them an
analogous weight of symbolic language, speaking eloquently of the primordial wildernesses
of the Americas. Yet in his work Tomás Sánchez travels to still more distant regions. He
infuses his images of nature with a sense of the unreachable. They are landscapes of the mind,
representing ineffable states of awareness, places where the universal merges with the
tangible to create levels of consciousness, which we aspire to reach in an ideal future.