ART, A HORIZON FOR COLOMBIA

Culture is the bridge between the mass of society and the authentic, united community, with a sense of belonging and responsibility in collective and public life. It creates citizenship and contributes to achieving peace and improving income. Through art, Colombia renews its affection for and pride in its cultural legacy. With art, we open up other horizons on which to work for the Colombia we love.

We Colombians are building up a propitious environment in which to place our arts and our artists on the world agenda. This environment is, necessarily, based on the existence of a State which guarantees security., coexistence and unity. With the help of all, Colombia will re-conquer peace and hold the place we deserve among the peoples of the earth.

The geometric world which Rodolfo Sanchez builds with doors and windows of impossible colors, with solid blocks and transparent arches, is another of the many roads we have in our country to reach the goal of the Colombia are seeking.

His exhibition, Horizon, the foreground, transcends cultural frontiers with the universal language of art. In it, h explores the geography of the profound Colombia, creating a graphic dimension for our cultural memory. His works contain the light, color and texture of our land making of them a heritage which can be shared with all the globe. That is the goal: to convert is work “into a threshold of the different horizons of the world”.     

The work of Colombian artists abroad is the best response of citizens to the minuscule group of terrorists who are determined to remove Colombia from all scenarios, especially those of culture, science and sports. Our decision to recover tranquility is unwavering. Nothing and nobody will hold back the firm resolve of the people to defeat the violence and terrorism which grew under the shelter of the weakness of authority, indulged by complaisant discourse and irresolute attitudes.

Let art be a good pretext for many to know our lands and their people. They will find in them Colombian landscapes and the open spaces which Rodolfo Sanchez recreates in his works, to bring contentment and solace to the inhabitants of the earth.

Watchtower

Mixed Media, 135x260 cm, 2002

Obelisc

Mixed Media, 10x12 cm, 2003

Arc

Mixed Media, 38x48 cm, 2003

THE DOOR THAT OPENS THE WORLD

Rodolfo Sanchez’ obsessive faithfulness to his creative nuclei is as admirable as it is suggestive. It reveals the tenacity with which an artist obstinately explains to him or herself what his or her vision signifies.

In the decade which has followed his successful career, from the time when he was a student in Madrid, a well and a door are his recurring themes. That door, whose provenance are the doors and windows of La Alhambra, had already created an illusion of that Arabian world. La Alhambra, let us not forget, is also a water garden built amid the most sensual and geometric of architectures. Let us keep this in our minds a we look at his paintings. It is the feverish thirst which creates oases in the desert.

It is only that the door-window, the concrete detonator of an ever fuller abstraction of their form and more vibrant and opulent in their colour, maintain on the wall a frontal impact impossible to ignore, the vertical cutting across the horizontal, rupturing the surface or the access to light of another dimension. Door-windows higher than our own yearning go beyond them with a look, or tiny repetitive to show how we remain captured by their enchantment.

It is the enchantment of one who sculpts a human imprint on the wall, an abrasion, for this unanimous planet of land and water to show the fleeting rubric of someone who passed by. It is that of one who felt the burning of the fiery sun, with its incandescent whiteness. That of one who realized how the diluted blue of the Mediterranean conjures malevolent spirits when applied surrounding the door of his houses, on the absoluteness whiteness of a chalky canvas.

This axes follows the line of the horizon and, where the sun sinks each day among the blood red seas, has also brought into being a new metamorphosis: a landscape seen from a movable window. It grows or diminishes by superimposing on those ever wider and dilated blocks. What at first glance was the compact rectangle of an explicit door is now  but a reference for the eyes to enter a creation which depends as much on the spectator as it does on the artist.

Like Matisse when he visited Tangiers in Morocco in 1909 or when Paul Klee traveled to Tunisia in 1914, Rodolfo Sanchez could well put his signature to what klee wrote in his diary after this overwhelming experience: “ Colour has taken possession of me forever. I no longer need to pursue it. I know that it has taken possession of me forever: I and colour are one. I am a painter.”

This amazing brilliance of the original light of the world, is a reaffirmation and its true interior can be shared. A truth which was born of the roughness of a texture, of scratches on a surface, of the ocean-like sky, of the dunes of mirror-like sand in perpetual movement. From this ferocious, melodic vegetation, which rocks and unsettles us with its visual coming and going. The Americans plains? The harsh crust of Africa? Reality no longer matters. What is important is to recognize how, thanks to paint, the wall has been broken and the time which impregnated it with its daily erosion has ceased to be the adversary and has become the accomplice of the artist. The world has become one on his tense, vibrant canvases, open to an eye which gathers from them, calmly and at the same time expectance. The door which opens with our glance reveals full and heavy dissociates himself from the beast only through his capacity to create. To dream concrete dreams.    

Lintel

Mixed Media, 100x81 cm, 2003

Patio

Mixed Media, 145x300 cm, 2002

Patio

Mixed Media, 145x300 cm, 2002

Imaginary Landscape

Mixed Media, 145x870 cm, 2003

Untitled

Mixed Media, 50x75 cm, 2002

Miniatures

Mixed Media, 7x14cm, 2003

Imaginary Landscape

Mixed Media, 18x27 cm, 2002

Miniatures

Mixed Media, 7x14 cm, 2003

House

Mixed Media, 45x90 cm, 2002

Fragment

Mixed Media, 20x20 cm, 2003

Untitled

Mixed Media, 60x160 cm, 2002

RODOLFO SANCHEZ LALINDE

Born in, 1March 1968

   rodolfo_art@hotmail.com     

EDUCATION

INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS

PRINCIPAL COLLECTIVE EXHIBITIONS

SCHOLARSHIPS

AWARDS

A richly textured improvisation on color, form and landscape
Colombian artist Rodolfo Sanchez: ‘Doors and windows are themes I have been working on for the last 15 years’

Christina Foerch
Special to The Daily Star

Rich colors, geometric forms and clear lines on grand format canvas ­ these are the corner pillars on which Rodolfo Sanchez’ art stands. Looking closer, one discovers doors, windows and most of all, horizons of imaginary landscapes. In fact, Horizon is the title for the Colombian painter’s current exhibition taking place at UNESCO Palace, and the display is accompanied by the experimental music of Colombian composer German Botero.
 

Sanchez is a painter who likes to improvise on architecture and landscapes. Each of his pictures bears names such as Arco (arch), Patio (yard), and Oceano (ocean). “Doors and windows are themes I have been working on for the last 15 years,” he says. “Doors and windows are a space of communication. These stand for a man’s relationship with the outer space.” However, rather than simplistic, there is a more thought, even a philosophy, behind the painter’s work.
 

Sanchez is suggesting that doors and windows can be seen as fixed frames, whereas the landscapes seen through these frames change constantly according to the light situation, the weather and the season. The horizon itself is yet another constant in Sanchez’ work. The contrast between fixed elements as well as constant change is something the painter also sees in human beings. “Human beings always remain human beings, but they also change constantly,” states Sanchez rather obviously, “especially inside.” Every artist needs inspiration, and Sanchez finds his in observing open landscapes as well as old cities.
 

In Colombia, he particularly liked the colonial-style coastal town of Cartagena. When he went to Spain to study art in Granada, he was amazed to find out that a similar kind of architecture existed in the famous Alhambra palace. And then, he actually discovered where this style of architecture originally came from ­ Morocco. “When I first saw Marrakesh, I was amazed. I suddenly understood from where this colonial-style Colombian architecture comes,” he says., He particularly fell in love with the fortresses.
 

His painting, Patio, is reminiscent of those fortresses and the house in the painting is as red as the city walls of Marrakesh during sunset.
Last year, Sanchez participated in an international art festival in Assilah, North Morocco. “I loved the colors of the desert,” he says, “the light you find in the Sahara is amazing, both of the sky and the earth. Light always surprises me.”
 

And in each part of the world, light has a different intensity, as do the colors of the sky and the shifting landscapes. After visiting Morocco, Sanchez traveled to Egypt where he became fascinated with the sunsets, and then to Kenya, where the vibrant colorful dresses of the native inhabitants caught his attention. And in Lebanon?
 

“I haven’t had time to see much yet,” Sanchez says. So far he has been to Harissa and was astonished by the beautiful view of the shoreline. “The Mediterranean Sea has a great impact on me. I also love the contrast of the mountains and the sea. These contrasts seem to be a bit violent.”
 

A Colombian art critic once compared Sanchez to modern European painters such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee, both of whom had traveled the Arab world seeking inspiration. In this context, the critic quoted Klee saying: “Color has taken possession of me forever … I and color are one. I am a painter.” The same can be said for Sanchez, but the parallels between the two artists go further than just rich colors, in the sense that their work is also heavily into geometric shapes.
 

However Klee’s miniatures are masterpieces, whereas the smaller paintings of Sanchez are less impressive than his larger format ones.
It is worth comparing Sanchez’s work to another German expressionist, Emil Nolde, who painted the wide, open landscape of Northern Germany using saturated colors like dark blues and deep reds. Sanchez’ painting Casa (House) could almost be mistaken for a Nolde painting, representing the tense atmosphere that exists before a thunderstorm breaks out on a summer afternoon.
 

The exhibition in Beirut continues until Feb. 12, before moving onto Morocco. But once Sanchez returns to his native city of Bogota, he will lock himself up in his studio and paint. This is when his journey toward his inner self will start. He will grasp a pencil, mix some colors, and create more paintings of his preferred theme of imaginary landscapes.

Horizon by Rodolfo Sanchez is at the UNESCO Palace until Feb. 12. Open daily from 10am to 7pm.