Serie Lonchas

America Sanchez

04/05/89. (Sala 109)

From 4 – 27 May 1989.

An un-fore-seeable visual poetry

Can you take a mysterious lunar landscape between the meat grains inlaid in a slice of sausage? Can an organic sausage producer mass-produce Archimboldos without knowing it?

If such questions seem bizarre it is because we had not seen the photographs of the exhibition, in the noblest sense of photographic tradition, America Sanchez reveals a world in which we have always had before our eyes. Apparently it is only about taking a photo and enlarging. But the results are far-reaching. The carnality of textures, exaggerated and transmuted at the same time, add to the geometric combination of shapes and the refined chromatic range to produce disturbing effects by contradictions. The materiality of the object is enough and is risen to the formal dignity of art and do not really know to which of the two the fascination that combines the image should be attributed.

On my part, I believe America Sanchez manages to take the practice of an irony to the extreme that has always tempered his peculiar plastic streak. The low extraction of his themes or creatures is subject, in general, to the most exquisite iconographic treatment, making this mix an unholy alliance that distils critical humour. An irony that stands at two different standpoints, on the one hand, it desecrates the pretensions so often vain or empty merely “painted words” of contemporary art and on the other, enhances the visual poetry hidden in the servile strata of reality. It is not just flesh but shape, colour and fantasy which can be stuffed into an intestine. And just one glance capable of decorating his objects with imagination finds a way to let us see it.

Nelly Schnaith. Barcelona, Abril 1989