In pursuit of understanding the intertwined relationship of color and light, Brian Sanchez’s practice explores drawing, photography, sculpture, and painting. Although his work extends across several mediums, he is most recognized for his inquiries into the continuation of post painterly abstraction, providing an innovative approach regarding the complexities of color theory and composition. However, a devotion to documenting humanity and the intricacies of existence are ultimately his guiding force. Stemming from humble beginnings, Brian’s self taught introduction to hard edge painting began laboriously with rehabilitating decrepit naval vessels and ship board signages. Today these techniques of a distant past carry over into his current studio tendencies and dexterous painting hand, allowing his present work to breathe new perspective into the historical art making method of utilizing flat colour. With the foundations of minimalism and formalism already established by his predecessors, Sanchez’s addition to this history presents color field painting amended for our times. As we hover on the cusp of a fully leaning digital age and the threat of a subsequent decline in the authenticity of human precision, Brian’s work embodies a timelessness, while remaining on the pulse of contemporary abstraction.
Sanchez’s formal investigations into color and shape involve core principles in the use of depth, highlight, shadow, form, and line as materials for sculpting images. Navigating a methodological process in the application of warming and cooling temperatures, he tests the proximities of shade and hue at the mercy of paint itself. With sources arising from a deep curiosity of the world around him, his questioning feeds a vast archive of information to re-contextualize and continually draw reference from. Brian’s distinct discernment of light and shadow leave us oscillating between foreground and background, oftentimes dissolving into one another, absorbing darkness, while simultaneously reflecting light back at us. Allowing each pass of the eye to take us down a different pathway, his palettes guide one to new destinations that may feel familiar in Nature or Figuration, whether corporeal or sentient, welcoming personal interpretation.
This course of examination in Sanchez’s studies generate a cycle of transitions often represented through portals, curtains, and strips of his peculiar colorations. Constructing an optical dialogue, his work emphasizes a reflection into the interior of a generation and culture unraveling and processing its grief, trauma, and vulnerability. Brian’s visual vocabulary invites a presentness to engage with the powers of pigment and pure color. Whilst not relying on traditional painting techniques like blending, translucency, or brush strokes to do so, his paintings are dependent mostly on opacity to hold themselves together, as though if only one color was altered the whole composition might seemingly fall apart before our eyes. Consequently, Sanchez’s works hold you immersed within the confines of their scale, framing, and the emulsion absorbed into the raw canvases weave. While traversing their expansive planes and fluid contours, each work in his oeuvre radiates with an undeniable otherworldliness.
Born in 1984, Sanchez has completed numerous large scale public projects, installations, participated in several art fairs nationwide and abroad, and is collected internationally. With more recent solo exhibitions in Seattle (2024) and London (2023). His work has also been shown in Portland, Virginia, Washington DC, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Texas, New York, and Tokyo, Japan.