Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to open the fall exhibition season with a solo show featuring new paintings by Cuban-born artist Yolanda Sánchez. A Verdant Heart features seven new large-scale oil paintings from the artist’s Miami studio. The work is celebratory and expansive, a conscious offering of pleasure and beauty. This is the artist’s sixth show with the gallery, who has represented Sánchez since 2009.
Gestural abstract painting is singular in its ability to convey a life force independent of fixed meaning or specific readability. Sánchez continues the legacy of painters such as Franz Kline, Brice Marden and Cy Twombly whose paintings express emotion through gestural paint application. The expert cadence of Sánchez’s brushstroke communicates unheard rhythms and the harmonies of opposing forces. Her paintings blur the lines between language and visual representation capturing vitality and spirituality with poetic grace.
Nature, in a very broad sense, continues to be the primary source of inspiration for Yolanda Sánchez. Her studies in calligraphy, dance, Eastern philosophy, poetry and the formal pictorial organization of Chinese and Japanese classical ink painting are simultaneously present her work. Tapping into the essential energy and power of these sources, the artist aesthetically and spiritually distills the sensations of energy and stillness into elegant embodiments of ideas and materials. Working with light, color, gestural brushstroke and the materiality of the oil paint itself, the artist opens a space for the viewer, an invitation to enter, to be present, to contemplate, and to finish the work, as it were. In Sánchez’s painting, subject and object dissolve and are replaced by a “presence without form”; there is no story to be told, just simply a call to awaken. For the artist, making art is a way of being present in the world; it is an act of attention. Through this attention, she gives back and offers praise to the world.
Among her many distinctions,Yolanda Sánchez is a Fulbright scholar and holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art. The artist exhibits extensively in the United States and in Korea and Italy.
