Painting & Invention

Saúl Sánchez

PEANA

September 6, 7—10 PM

Via Clodia 169

Entre Ave. Fuentes del Valle y Rio Missouri

San Pedro, Garza Garcia 66220

Image Caption: Saúl Sánchez, Avenues to Abundance, 2018. Oil and Silkscreen ink on linen, and steel. (96.5 x 190.5 cm / 38 x 75 in.)

For his solo exhibition, Painting and Invention, Saúl Sánchez (b.1977) took over the pages of a book about the history of machines, published in the 1960s. The text recalls how man, after realizing that his hands could be more than limbs, developed tools and machines to facilitate his work, such as the telegraph, the assembly line, and the electric motor. The peculiar thing about the selected folios is that they are intervened by a series of scribbles made by one or several anonymous readers who once had the book in their hands and decided to inherit new doodles to the next reader.

What Sánchez does is reproduce some of these pages and, through the overlay of oil and print making, accentuate the lines that invade them, and then sing them out in canvases and sculptures. Thus, the artist seeks to emphasize the pictorial qualities of the scribble – of the manual, instinctive, childish action – that invades an image that has been reproduced mechanically.

Saul Sanchez holds an MFA from Parsons, The New School for Design, New York (2016), and a BFA from Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas, Bogota (2005). He has been invited to show work in Colombia’s leading venues and events such as the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango (Bogotá), Alliance Française (Bogotá), and 42 Salón Nacional de Artistas (Colombia). Internationally, Saul has exhibited work in venues such as Action Field Kodra, Municipality of Kalamaria, (Thessaloniki), Provincial Arts Center (Havana), Santral (Istanbul), and Diego Rivera House Museum, (Guanajuato).

Saul Sánchez’s work questions different ideas related to the conceptual values of painting and the process conditions, proper of the different ways of representing images. Color interpretation, the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, and the relationship between the traditional forms and the contemporary practices of pictorial environment, are some of the main topics that structure his work. Through installation projects, paintings and drawings, Saul explores the relationships those art forms have with their context (commercial, institutional and educational).