Tomás Sánchez (B. 1948)

oil on canvas

Private Collection, Miami (acquired from the artist, 1983)

Havana, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1a. Bienal de La Habana, Pabellón Cuba, May 22-July 9, 1984, n.n.

Please note that the correct medium for ths work is oil on canvas. The canvas is unlined and well stretched. There appear to be minor creases throughout the canvas. There are frame abrasions visible intermittently along the left edge. Under ultraviolet light there appears to be significant scattered inpainting throughout the work. In the sky it is mostly along the top edge, the largest areas measuring 3 in. in the upper right corner. There is also significant inpainting along the horizon line most likely touching up areas of minor loss due to paint lifting. There is a 3 by 1 in. area of inpainting (10 in. from the left edge) in the center of the canvas above the small tree. There is also extensive inpainting in the tree line in the center of the canvas with several areas measuring between 1 and 4 in. There is a 2 in. area of inpainting in the sand in the center covering up possible paint loss where there was paint lifting. There is also inpainting along the bottom edge and throughout the water the largest areas measuring approximately 3 in.
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Executed in 1983, La orilla is a remarkable work both for its ambitious scale and the specific circumstances of its creation. In 1980, Sánchez won the prestigious International Prize of Drawing awarded by the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona. The latter was a turning point in his career as it garnered him greater recognition and financial success while also generating numerous opportunities to exhibit his work internationally. One such opportunity came in 1983, when Sánchez was invited to have a one-person exhibition of his drawings at the Visual Artists Union Gallery in Moscow. Sánchez, whose previous excursions outside of Cuba had been few and far between, arrived in the capital of the former USSR in the midst of one of its most frigid winters. As he contemplated the snow-covered Russian city, the shock and contrast of this new setting must have been truly dramatic. But armed with the memories of his homeland and its beautiful terrain he began to work almost immediately on a large-scale painting that would soothe his own sense of dislocation while providing his Russian hosts with a spectacular image of his native land. The result of his labor was La orilla, a painting that envelops and seduces the viewer upon first impression. Its' sheer scale beckons us to enter this idealized territory—as the gentle currents of the river pull us in and lead us to a seemingly infinitesimal field of trees and the open blue skies beyond.

 

La orilla contains many of the fundamental elements that Sánchez would further develop in the ensuing years—the use of a panoramic or sweeping vista that imbues the painting with a sense of drama and monumentality, the emphasis on linear perspective and the structuring of the composition along a horizontal axis that further accentuates the sense of expansiveness and depth as well as the magnetic force of the work which pulls the viewer into the painting, and finally the 'contemplador'—typically the image of a man with his back to the viewer (perhaps the artist himself or a metaphor for all mankind) who appears to contemplate his surroundings with a profound sense of wonderment and a feeling of oneness with nature. A sentiment not unlike that expressed by Sánchez in the following statement, "I look at landscape with a sense of reverence, but I feel totally included within it. What is inside is also outside. I feel as if I am outside looking at what is inside."¹

 

 

 

 1 As quoted in "Interview with Tomás Sánchez," in Edward J. Sullivan, Tomás Sánchez, Milan: Skira Editore, 2003, p. 19