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

 Antes del Arte 

in 1967, the art critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni promoted an art group in Valencia which was the starting point for a new movement grounded in Op and Kinetic art. The mandate of the group was to establish nexuses between science and art. Optical illusions, impossible figures and images deriving from Gestalt psychology were critical elements in its creations.

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.

Sol rojo is structured around a central circular mirror from which a succession of wavy red lines emerge in a radial pattern, simulating the rays of the sun. The reflective support, as well as the mirror, enable the viewer to participate actively; by moving from side to side, we experience the optical illusion of the

 moiré 

the moiré effect or moiré pattern is a visual effect generated by overlaying two grids of lines at an angle or when the grids have slightly different mesh sizes. The origin of the expression comes from a type of silk or fabric with a rippled, “watered” effect.

effect. The work is open to a whole range of interpretations; it seems to be alive and constantly changing, according to the angle of the light, the surroundings, and the viewer’s state of mind.