Gallery photographs: Raúl Belinchón
America Sanchez
From may 26 to september 8, 2022
Before drawing
It was necessary to draw, and there is no other way of drawing than by hand, by the dumbest passage and on the red-hot wall. Before drawing there was the effort, the attempt to reach the pure precision of the inconcrete. Before the effort, the moment, which no longer awaited its hour. Before the moment, the candour, equal to and different from its precedents. Before the candour, the miracle, which happened outside and inside at the same time. Before the miracle, the wait, the round of thought in the vigil, and not all vigil is that of open eyes. Before the waiting, the patient learning that a drawing contains its own story that is both common and unrepeatable within it.
This anthological exhibition by America Sanchez, whose title «bidujos» vindicates the Edenic barbarism of childhood, brings together works from the last twenty years. The temporal arc shows the centrality that this prehistoric discipline has occupied in his research. Emotion is never absent. Each piece of the vast multiple work has been happily executed, each portrait celebrates the shape and enjoys the colour as it has never been done before, nor will it ever happen again.
Alejandro García Schnetzer
Barcelona, 2022
America Sanchez, drower ao vivo
in 7 scrawls.
1. America Sanchez, like Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos is a psychodifferent. For that reason, drowing is the central practice of his life. More than a discipline, it is a constant timeline.
2. America Sanchez devotes himself to drowing, letting drowing take possession of him. It is his secret, intimate, shamanic operation: to be the first spectator of that coming from the ineffable.
3. America Sanchez carries a notebook and a pencil in his car. At every traffic light stop, he looks to left or right and drows the portrait of the person that chance has placed under her gaze. A space of risk and precision. There is no waiting or urgency. No search or speculation either. Only drowing in a solid state.
4. America Sanchez saw Marcel Duchamp play chess in the Melitón bar in Cadaqués. He also saw Joseph Beuys at Documenta 5 in 1972. This record is evident in each one of his drowings.
5. America Sanchez is an excellent dancer of tropical rhythms: salsa, merengue, chachachá, mambo, cumbia… In many of his interviews, he insists on the need for dance in connection with the drowing practice. Improvisation on a rhythmic basis, fantasy, rigour, time. The body involved, the mind playful. Erotic friction and ecstasy through fatigue. We can imagine the title of an edition gathering his work: «America Sanchez: I am all drowing».
6. America Sanchez is an expert connoisseur and communicator of «art brut», outsider or art of crazy, marginal, anonymous people. Those who have not passed through the academy. Hidden, secret, rare and the rarer the better. Nourishment and sap that circulates through their drowings. Wisdom acquired from fine, persistent and loving observation.
7. America Sanchez insists on a sentence that he repeats at each of the meetings of the Drowing Club: «you can’t do it slower». The phrase comes from René Lavand, a genius of card tricks. Lavand did them with only one hand, as he was one-armed. This apparent limitation, coupled with the complexity of the tricks, made his performances memorable, receiving worldwide recognition and admiration. Limitation, slowness and drowing: a territory always open to exploration, with no clear boundaries or apparent destination where America Sanchez moves in one`s element.
Mario Gemin
May 2022
Gabinete de dibujos 