Down The Drain – Long Story Short Gallery NY

Down the Drain
Curated by Rebecca Polanzke
Long Story Short Gallery
New York
2023

 

 

 

Down The Drain refers to Sánchez’s depictions of expansive worlds that have been partially washed away. Incorporating visual codes and iconography from a variety of genres and styles, the artist’s paintings of corroding dreamscapes and scrambled imagery feature bright colors and varying textures.The fragmented nature of the works is offset through harmonious compositions that balance chaos with color and space. 

In the artist’s playful and improvisational paintings, Sánchez composes “collages” by positioning macabre subjects against Boschian backdrops. Anthropomorphic animals, disembodied appendages, and conjoined bodies reminiscent of children’s illustrations or science fiction are “collaged” with contrasting exteriors. Detached from their individual contexts, each character becomes a stranger in a strange land. 

The isolating settings in Sánchez’s work serve as allegories for intangible loss and, subsequently, recovering or recontextualizing what remains. Figures and landscapes removed from their original contexts emphasize feelings of alienation as they blindly confront their new worlds. Disturbing characters are now reimagined in surroundings that portray their unsettling features in a humorous manner. 

Many of Sánchez’s paintings incorporate troubled landscapes with aspects of pollution, floods, fire, and extreme weather alluding to climate change. His approach to this disruptive inevitability adds an underlying quality of realism that allows the works to feel fantastical yet tethered to the here and now.