Tomás Sánchez · Oir las aguas (Hear the Water)

Tomás Sánchez (Cuba, b.1948), 1995. Acrylic on canvas, 122.5 x 150 cm. (48¼ x 59 in). Private collection. © Tomás Sánchez / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

“I like to meditate before the landscape. That gives me a different perspective when I finally sit down to paint one. While other painters begin by intellectualizing nature, I think of myself recreating it”

Tomás Sánchez

Born in 1948 in Aguada de Pasajeros, Cuba, Tomás Sánchez is probably the most famous Cuban contemporary painter. Although he is often considered a hyperrealist painter, Sanchez’s tropical forests come from inside his mind. Just like Henri Rousseau said that he was “in a dream“ every time he went to the tropical gardens in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Sánchez declared in an interview that “when I enter a state of meditation it is as if I’m in a jungle or a forest“.

“Oir las aguas” is one of Sánchez’s most famous paintings. The influence of Caspar David Friedrich -or even the painters of the Hudson River School- is evident in the idea of the insignificance of the human figure when compared with nature. This ideal landscape, almost perfectly symmetrical, is the visual image of how the mind of the artist imagines Cuba before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers.

G. Fernández – theartwolf.com