04 June 2011 - 27 November 2011 - Francisco Sanchéz - Andorra at the 54th Venice Art Biennale -

Triptych (02) "The ephemeral reality" - 2011 - Mixed media - 162 x 114 - Credits: Government of Andorra - Àlex Tena

Extracts from "The ephemeral and the eternal".

John Gil Gregorio. Deputy commissioner. Member of the International Association of Art Critics.

The voids, the lacks, the prolonged silences take on a mysterious dimension and act more forcefully than the presence. This artist's struggle against stable and immutable reality gives all the strength to absence, to nothingness, to identify with ephemeral and fleeting perception. He values the void not as a passive absence but as a space that generates energy.

The stripping and nudity as the foundation of his work is translated into laconic visions that have more to do with inner states than with real configurations. Warm canvases that become the deposit on which transparencies and translucencies, revelations and concealments, realities and fictions, presences and absences, representations and allusions, and ultimately, life and death, create evocative situations that explore the terrain of the unfathomable.

Painter of desolation and stillness, Francisco Sanchéz exercises silent observation to know and recognize the origin of man and the trace that remains of his existence. Faced with these narratives, a strange and uncertain emotion takes hold of the spectator: it is the memory of what has been experienced; of an unrepeatable world that escapes the gaze. For this reason, he avoids the noises and stridentness that are associated with colors, to stop time and suspend it in an eternal silence, in the same way that in a dream placidity is the essential moment of expression.