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OPINION | Tomás Sánchez, a painter from the most mystical and beautiful tropics | CNN

2020-12-04T17:33:39.973Z


Tomás Sánchez is a painter from the tropics and all of us who were born in the tropics understand how exuberant - and at the same time mystical - his work. Mari Rodríguez Ichaso interviewed him exclusively for CNN en Español and this was what they talked about. | Opinion | CNN


Adoration, Tomás Sánchez, 2005

Editor's Note:

Mari Rodríguez Ichaso has been a contributor to Vanidades magazine for several decades.

Specialist in fashion, travel, gastronomy, art, architecture and entertainment.

Film producer.

Style columnist for CNN en Español.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely his own.

Read more opinion pieces at cnne.com/opinion

(CNN Spanish) -

Tomás Sánchez lives within his paintings, and also in the videos of his habitat that he publishes on Instagram.

From what surrounds it: the Costa Rican forest, the mountains and —from time to time—.

the sea.


It is impressive to see how an artist takes us to the world in which he lives, a world that he captures in his work.

Since I got to know its landscapes - —and especially the solitude of its landscape— - I was intrigued to know who Tomás Sánchez was, the Cuban artist living in Costa Rica, who is considered today one of the best painters in Latin America, and whose works are sold at auction houses such as Sotheby's or Christie's.

His success is well deserved and that is why I admire him - —in addition to taking me to Cuba, my own homeland— - and to those landscapes of palm trees and clouds that make me dream so much of the place where I was born.

Tomás Sánchez is a painter from the tropics and all of us who were born in the tropics understand how exuberant - and at the same time the mystical - of his work.

I recently interviewed him exclusively for CNN en Español and this is what we talked about.

Mari Rodríguez Ichaso

: —Someone said that your paintings have “rediscovered” the way we look at the landscape.

Can you tell me about this?

How does nature mark you?

Tomás Sánchez:

—Since a very young age I have had a close relationship with nature.

My grandfather was a gardener at the sugar mill where we lived.

My father, in his spare time, worked in the fields and took me with him.

We were going fishing, but more than that I remember the walks through a place called Baracaldo.

The Ciénaga de Zapata, near there, was declared a protected place, a reserve and the images of that place, the Laguna de las Piedras, the Laguna del Tesoro, penetrated deeply into me.

My mother also made us stop the television or whatever we were doing every afternoon to watch the sunset.

Respect for nature is instinctive in me, and a value instilled by my family.

MRI: -

Is that why you see the landscape in a very personal way?

TS:

—About looking at the landscape in my work, I don't think I see it like the rest of the landscape designers, I don't have the immediate impulse to reproduce it.

I have done a lot of natural work as an exercise, but what interests me is to approach the landscape from the experience of meditation.

MRI: -

Meditation?

TS:

- I have been practicing it for 50 years, and, at times, I have had the experience, coming out of a good meditation, and that when I face nature again I realize that I am perceiving everything that surrounds me and all its details.

There is something amazing about that experience and it makes me very happy.

When it comes to the fact that I have rediscovered the landscape, I think that what others really see in my work is that singularity that my approach to nature has through the practice of meditation.

I think that is perceived in my work.

Isolate, Tomás Sánchez, 2001

MRI

: —Yes… there is something mystical in your work.

It is ethereal.

Look for perfection and order.

It will be because of that practice of yoga and meditation ...

TS:

—The practice of meditation, that feeling of stability, of inclusion, of belonging to a whole, brings an experience and an idea of ​​order to my work.

There is in my work a search for perfection, for an idealized landscape, a landscape that represents nature and a landscape of meditation.

MRI: -

Is it true that you paint yourself in some works as a tiny witness of the nature that surrounds you?

TS:

—In very few occasions, the character, the witness that appears in my work is consciously a self-portrait.

Although I identify myself with that figure and many people associate it with me, it is not my purpose to portray myself in the landscape.

MRI: -

Do you have a discipline to work?

My friend Fernando Botero, for example, paints every day without fail, wherever he is.

TS:

—As Botero has told you, whoever feels like a painter never stops painting.

It is so.

There is a poem by Luis Rogelio Nogueras that has an image with which I identify my work: "As the baker kneads the bread of the poor every morning of God."

I work every day, wherever I am.

Sometimes I have to force myself on weekends not to work and go out to visit nature outside the place where I live, because I love it, but painting absorbs me.

The river goes, Tomás Sánchez, 2020

MRI:

—How is your life?

I always see your videos on Instagram and it is as if you live inside your paintings.

TS:

I lead an orderly life, I get up, meditate, exercise, walk in the garden and paint.

Meal times are also ordered.

Painting is an essential part of my life, I paint as Miró said, as a vital act: how I eat, how I walk, how I breathe.

MRI:

—Do you know when you've finished a painting? Or is it difficult for you and you keep coming back to it?

TS:

—Sometimes I consider a painting finished, and, indeed, it already is;

but others I am left with the desire to continue returning to it.

I always work many pieces at the same time and when I insist on a piece that is visibly finished, I let it go and then, in another painting, I manage to return and resolve what bothered me in the previous one.

MRI:

—You live surrounded by a tropical jungle, a forest disordered by nature itself, but your paintings are orderly.

They follow a certain symmetry.

They give peace, because in real life mountains and forests are sometimes very dramatic and irregular ...

TS:

—Nature has its own order.

When nature looks disorderly it is because man has intervened in it and then things get out of control, it is a struggle between man and her.

But when I go to a virgin forest what I perceive is an absolute order in everything.

MRI:

—Describe yourself please.

As a person and as an artist.

TS:

—I don't even like to say that I'm an artist.

I have never stopped being a peasant.

Since I was a child, even coming from a family of worker-peasant origin, I really liked reading, philosophy, I was very interested in studying religion, along this path I became interested in oriental cultures, yoga, meditation.

Meditation is the most important thing in my life for me, even above painting.

I shouldn't say that because I can't stop painting either, it's a vital necessity, but I couldn't stop meditating, both things complement each other.

I am a somewhat hermit individual.

As a child I would have wanted to be a monk, but it was not my way.

When I met my guru, she showed me that my path was precisely painting and that painting was part of my spiritual practice.

I am also a human being with the wishes and desires of any human being, but what has always weighed the most in my life is the need to know myself, to know who I am and what purpose this life has.

Since I was a child I have thought a lot about death and that has helped me to reconcile myself with that idea, I am not afraid of death.

The experience of meditation has taught me that we are more than this body that we inhabit today, as Walt Whitman wrote: "I am not just this that lies between my hat and my shoes."

The river goes, Tomás Sánchez, 2020

MRI:

—Cuba in you ,.

How did you make your mark?

TS:

—I have never stopped feeling Cuban.

That also defines me.

I have not renounced Cuba, I have not given it to others, I still feel that it belongs to me and from there my love and concern for it constantly resurfaces.

And neither do I renounce the affection that I receive from the people in Cuba, and the one that I give.

MRI: - Do you

dream of those landscapes of your childhood?

With your life in the country?

I dream of Havana that I adore!

I left Cuba at the age of 19, after many years of the Revolution… We Cubans suffer from this nostalgia.

I think everyone, even though we now have happy lives.

And you?

TS:

—I dream of my childhood in my town.

With escapes from my house to go for a walk in the country.

My mother had no idea that I got to go almost 30 km away from my house, towards the Cienaga de Zapata.

I have a mixture of landscapes and images.

Nostalgia makes you mentally return to the places where you have been happy.

There is an idea of ​​Eastern culture, very present in much of Western poetry.

In fact, it is used by our compatriot, the poet Delfín Prats, who makes it clear that you must not return to the places where you have been happy.

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2020-12-04

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