Eduardo Sanz

(Santander, 1928 - Madrid, 2013)

Untitled

n.d

enamel on glass, mirror and lens

100 x 100 cm

Inv. no. 35640

BBVA Collection Spain


An attachment to the sea of his home region is very evident in Sanz’s most recent work, which is markedly hyperrealist in style, but he remains a versatile, restless and committed artist who finds a way of expressing his feelings by experimenting with materials.

He trained at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. His earliest works from the beginning of the sixties reflect his interest in Informalismo, a movement which was then at its height.

However, from 1962-63 his pioneering spirit and his desire to achieve an accommodation between art and society led him to a process of material and formal experimentation which he was to pursue during a substantial period of his artistic career, culminating in 1975, when he returned to traditional painting media. In the late sixties he joined the
movement, promoted by the critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni. This group drew together other artists such as Eusebio Sempere (1923-1985) and José María Yturralde (1942), developing an artistic idiom based on kinetics and optical illusions and designed to amalgamate art and science.

During this period Sanz introduced glass and mirrors as supports, with the intention of involving viewers in his art and making it interact with them. His first mirrors, or “geometric landscapes”, as the artist himself called them, date from 1963, and the last from 1974, the year he produced this piece. In these works he seeks to create a geometric order, combining colour with the reflective surfaces on which to apply it.

This piece, similar to Sol rojo, also in the BBVA Collection, is structured around a circular mirror from which successive lines irradiate to form an oval. With these geometric combinations the artist seems to be evoking a large eye: the eye of the artist looking at the beholder and actively taking part in the observation of the work, which offers the optical illusion of a
pattern.

The work contains manifold readings. It seems to be “alive” and in constant transformation thanks to the effect of the light impinging upon it and to the place where it is located, depending on the spectator looking at it and his momentary frame of mind.