The boundaries between the heavenly, the divine and the mundane are blurred in Tomás Sánchez´s “inner landscapes”. His work profoundly influenced by yoga, is a sort of spiritual mapping in which the artist has the body and nature dialogue. Practicing Hata Yoga, meditation becomes an essential epicenter in his painting. Even, there is no hierarchical distinction between the two processes, painting and yoga, artistic creation and meditation overlap and intermingle. Tomas´s landscapes are precisely a way, a path of inner reflection in which art-meditation-nature is articulated. Perhaps Relación (1986) expresses Tomas´s triple substrate in which the kind of islets mirror each other, and end up forming a transcendental landscape. The artist himself states in his official website statements:
There have always been two fundamental interests in my life: art and meditation. Both closely related. The interior spaces that I experiment in meditation become my painting landscapes; the restlessness of the mind translates into landfills. When painting I experiment meditative states; I do my meditation with nature, and nature in turn leads me to meditation. The inner experience is to unite all that exists; the outer experience of unity in diversity. This sensitizes me with everything around me. I respect diversity and free speech, in life as in art. [1]
Whoever contemplates Tomas´s landscapes will notice that the pair art and life pronounces through meditation practices which integrates the artistic exercise. Undoubtedly, his views are part of the traditions arrived and sedimented on the island with the arrival of the first Asian settlers in the nineteenth century. However, unlike the nineteenth-century painters, Tomas did not inherit the precise line, or the Chinese art poly-focality, but a spirit, a conception of the universe sealed by man’s relationship with nature. Thus, landfills are not just a metaphor for the destruction of the environment, but a comparison of decay, of modern man´s skepticism.
Thinking of Tomás Sánchez work implies meeting at a crossroads in which there are only two alternatives: harmony or destruction; on one hand landscapes of rivers and forest trees and on the other, their garbage dumps. But penetration and influence of Eastern philosophy in his creation requires perhaps rethinking this apparent duality in his painting. The Yin and Yang principle foreshadows an antagonistic unfolding of the universe in which each force element is complemented by its opposite. Thus, his landscapes could become a kind binomial in which a parable about cosmos and man is explicit. Tomás Sánchez transforms the landscape into a contemplative practice that exceeds the limits of the easel. His work “pollutes” mind, it turns an aesthetic experience into alienation time and loneliness. The subtlety and perfection with which Thomas paints seems to undo and dilute self motifs that represent; before its creation emptiness spiritualized in landscape.
[1] Tomás Sánchez, at www.tomassanchez.com. Retrieved on February 8, 6:46 pm.
