There is an serie fusion of the sardonic and the humorous in the 50 “icons” of Bartolome Sanchez, a young Venezuelan artist, now mounted at the Dhoomi Mal Gallery.
Created out collage, Chinese ink, polycromat paper, the work of Sanchez are a part of his long search into the archaeology of iconography or signs as the artist puts it.
He uses bright cut-pieces of coloured foils which sometimes give a gem-like quality – small coruscating areas of colour and light to his compositions.
In his apparently abstract compositions of almost mathematical abstraction and precision, the patient viewer will feel the elusive presence of humour and poetry. He has the sensitiveness of a compass needle when it comes to the arrangement of lines and colour areas. Like a political cartoonist, Sanchez grasps the “visual” crux of a complex pattern of ideas and associations.
His “Peasant Melody” and “Birds Going up the Cascades” are cases in point. One is reminded of the abstraction of Kandinsky and the unearthly humour of Klee ( his Twittering Machine, for instance). Look at the dusky brown ground of the first, and see how the moon-form subtly redeems the mathematical array of coloured paper paste-ups and relates the whole to the abiding poetry in the lives of the sons of the soil. In the second, see how the bird-forms are “musicalised” in the form of scintillating pieces of foils that go up against the cascading lines coming down.
Particularly interesting works are “The Boy on a Dolphin” and “Bullfight”. They testify that Sanchez has all the qualities of a political cartoonist and at this stage of his career, the choice still remains open.
Two fencing posts, dug in apart from each other have fallen in love with each other, and Sanchez names this piece “Amor Impossible” (Impossible Love). Like most of his other pieces, this has also the magic eloquence that arises, paradoxically, out of the reticence and restrained use of visual stageprops. Look at the innocent looking nails hammered into two white boards that cap the two posts. The sardonic and the pathetic, the cartoonist and the poet, fuse here. All the worn out cliche of star-crossed love affair are re-created on a very different plane.
By Santo Datta / Art Critic
Indian Express. Thursday, September 02, 1982.
New Delhi, India.