Born in 1984, Brian Sanchez primarily works in drawing, photography, sculpture, and painting. With a practice rooted in the pursuit of understanding the intertwined relationships of color and light, he is most recognized for his present inquiries into the continuation of post painterly abstraction. Cultivating a new approach regarding the complexities and capacity of color theory and composition. Sanchez’s interest stems from humble beginnings, as a self-taught introduction to hard edge painting began laboriously in the rehabilitation of decrepit naval vessels and maritime signage. Today these techniques of a distant past carry over into his studio tendencies and dexterous painting hand, allowing his current body of work to breathe new life into the historical art making method of utilizing flat colour with opaque boundaries.
For the last two decades Brian’s formal analysis into color and shape involve core principles in the use of depth, highlight, shadow, form, and line as materials for sculpting images. Implementing a methodological process in the application of warming and cooling of color temperatures, he challenges the proximities of shade and hue at the mercy of pigments materiality. Sanchez’s distinct discernment of light and shadow alternate between foreground and background, oftentimes dissolving into one another, whilst absorbing darkness and concurrently reflecting light back at the viewer. Allowing for familiar forms to emerge within the constraints of the paintings parameters. His expansive planes, fluid contours, and nuanced palettes shape vague abstractions of themes throughout art history via nature, landscape, portals, architecture, and figuration. Offering a departure from traditional ideas of hard edge painting techniques more established in design, geometric abstraction, or decoration.
The surface of Sanchez’s paintings simultaneously buzz with a corporeal and sentient hum, as the emulsion paint absorbed into the raw canvases weave communicate with their partnering color relationships. Welcoming anew emotive interactions with hard edge painting and embodying an openness for connection. Resulting in each work of his oeuvre radiating with an undeniable energy and otherworldliness.
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) and forthcoming New York (2027). His work has also been shown in Portland, Virginia, Washington DC, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Texas, Florida, and Tokyo, Japan.