An artist’s own life story and personal baggage always inform their creative output, whether they like it or not. In Raquel Sanchez’s case, there’s a lot to tell. The mere bio facts make for mouthwatering reading.
Try this for starters. “I was born in Paris to Venezuelan parents, with an affluent writer father,” says Sanchez. The said parent was Juan Sánchez Peláez, an acclaimed man of letters who won his country’s National Prize for Literature in the poetry category. “He died in 2003, right before he was due to be up for a Nobel Prize,” she adds.
Sanchez had plenty of creative endeavors, every way she looked, in her infant milieu and later on. “There were a lot of artists around us,” she recalls. “My mother became friends with [celebrated Latvian-American abstract painter] Mark Rothko, when I was little. She told me he was a great painter,” Sanchez laughs. “When I met him I kept touching his hands, to see where the magic came from.”
Her mother is American-born still active painter and sculptor Ellen Lapidus Stern, and Sanchez herself is, somewhat unsurprisingly, a poet and painter. She currently has an exhibition on show at Artists House in Tel Aviv, curated by Vera Pilpoul, which goes by the highly evocative name of Viewing Spirituality.
That, for starters, is an intriguing titular pairing. The first, observational, part is self-explanatory in an artistic context, but the spiritual side to the creative experience largely feeds off Sanchez’s decision to become religiously observant later in life.
Sanchez, who was born in the 1960s, says she always had a paintbrush in her hand, although she was not always set on becoming an artist. “I started to take it way more seriously a few times. Once after my father passed. I felt I couldn’t write [poetry] anymore. I was sad.”
By now I was beginning to get some idea of Sanchez’s spread of gifts and skills, although I only later discovered she’d also trained as a psychiatric nurse and set up a center for English-speaking at-risk youth in Jerusalem called The Rose Institute.
Painting eventually won out. She continued to make inroads, landing a gig in New York with a new arts publication that brought her face-to-face with pop art icon Andy Warhol. She also became a close friend of neo-expressionism leading light Jean-Michel Basquiat.
It wasn’t just a matter of finding her feet in the art world. It was more of a homecoming. “It was a world where I really felt comfortable, a world where I kind of understood everything. I was in like 22 different schools before graduating high school. My comfort zone was always the art world.
“And I hung out with Basquiat. We’d do one-line drawings together. And he spoke all my languages – French, English, and Spanish. I was the only one who called him Jean-Michel. Everyone else called him Michael. We had fun together.”
SANCHEZ IS a soft-spoken character who exudes an air of quiet determination and subtle undertones of fun. It also comes across in the Viewing Spirituality collection. She returned to painting, with a vengeance, about eight years ago, around the time she met American-born Jerusalem gallery owner Uri Rosenbach.
Sanchez’s inner odyssey, her embracing of a religious lifestyle, and her decision to settle here all come through in the works. It also helped to center her and, at long last, provide her with a solid base from which she is able to aspire to higher planes of personal and creative expression.
“I work from inside and really try to have my own voice and express what language I want to be speaking. This is the first language that I kind of have control of making,” she says.
Having spent so much of her early life flitting across such diverse cultural and artistic milieus, she found herself blessed with a sumptuous multi-layered source of inspiration but cursed with a referential overload. She had to try to sort out the wheat from the chaff and found her very own pathway through the disciplinary minefield.
Getting a look at some of Sanchez’s paintings just before they were unveiled in Tel Aviv, I got an unmistakable sense of her drive to have her say get her feelings and thoughts, her take on life, the universe, and everything else out there and onto the canvas.
The works lean toward the abstract but have clear figurative elements and suggest something akin to surrealism. All the paintings attempt to grasp and portray ethereal light, in various guises. There is also a recognizable divine orientation to the whole project. That, presumably, is fueled by her religious proclivities.
“I think that everything that we are always becomes part of our artistic expression, unless we’re trying to copy Van Gogh.” Succinctly put.
Incendiary dynamism
There is also an incendiary dynamism to the pictures offset by a sense of unfathomable substrata and vast space. She says it emanated from her endeavor to dig into her own subtext, with more than a little help from Rosenbach. “I think my ability to really get to my soul language came about because of Uri. He understood what I was saying.”
What Sanchez is saying is up for grabs, for we viewers to have our say and add our understanding of Sanchez’s mystical yet patently accessible offerings to her work.
She does, however, provide some interpretive and encouraging pointers. “It takes a lot of fighting within yourself to find something that you can put out there and really work out how to get rid of the negativity, to find something higher.
“I think what we need, and what we have needed for a long time, is how to evolve. We need to find something we can do to evolve. We need to stop fighting with each other, and within ourselves. That’s the same thing.”
“Viewing Spirituality” closes on February 8. For more information: (03) 524-6685 and artistshouse.org.il
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