Basurero

Landscape has long remained the fulcrum of Sánchez’s practice, a medium of introspection and of conscience. “My approach to landscape is the result of a confrontation with my interiorization of the land,” he explains. “I look at landscape with a sense of reverence, but I feel totally included within it. What is inside is also outside. I feel as if I am outside looking at what is inside... I’d say that this is a more spiritual—and more ecological—attitude toward landscape” (quoted in E. Sullivan, “Interview with Tomás Sánchez,” Tomás Sánchez, Milan, 2003, p. 19). Sánchez lobbied the Cuban state unsuccessfully to establish an ecological foundation, and his stewardship of nature has manifested in both pristine, idealized landscapes, like Orilla, and their inverse—garbage dumps, like the present Basurero, that describe the waste and ruin of the world.

Sánchez left Cuba for Mexico in 1989, and in the garbage dumps of Mexico City he found a new kind of landscape, a wasteland more colorful than the tropics he had painted before and an immediately irresistible subject. Basurero belongs to an ongoing series of post-apocalyptic landfills teeming with the flotsam and jetsam of modern life—metal drums and wooden crates, trash bags and broken picture frames. Here, the garbage swells almost like the sea, waves of waste cresting from side to side of the image; the high horizon line tilts sharply from right to left, magnifying the seeming endlessness of the debris that spills forward into sharp, blue-tinted focus. A rough-hewn cross stands atop one swell of trash while a fire burns in the distance—signs, perhaps, of coming salvation and purification amid the desolation of the junkyard scene.

“For many years I have insisted that the garbage dumps and the works that depict nature in a more contemplative fashion are part of a whole,” Sánchez recently remarked. “Both are landscapes and both directly address our relationship with nature. A landscape where nature is in its most pristine state somehow expresses it in all its potential, that hopeful narrative that is at the centre of all the cataclysms that lie ahead—at least to those who live attentive to the gradual destruction of the environment. The dumps, which are so colorful and imposing, bear witness to these cataclysms, the impact of man on his environment. It is a duality, I believe that one could not exist without the other. Both are calls for attention—red flags—not a lesson about the current situation because I am not a moralist, but it is my way of insisting that there is a future scenario for which we are collectively responsible. Every detail of the garbage, which is usually massive in my work, bears embedded depictions of who we are as humanity. I don’t know if my paintings can change the way we relate to nature, but in my experience, it leads us to that first stage, which is reflection” (“Interview with Tomás Sánchez,” Avant Arte, 8 March 2021).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park