Fanny Sanín: Eyes Wide Open

Fanny Sanín: Eyes Wide Open

By Lawrence Rinder

The story of Fanny Sanín’s life in art—as told by herself and others—divides into two distinct chapters: first, her work in oil paint and gestural abstraction; second, her later work in hard-edge, geometric acrylics. This duality is usually described as an advancement, from an early period inspired by—and perhaps somewhat derivative of—European tachistes as well as Sanín’s Latin American contemporaries, to a more mature period which, though drawing heavily on work by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, is seen as more original and, therefore, significant. This interpretation, however, may be excessively formal, focusing too strongly on qualities of shape, line, surface, and composition in making its case. Observing Sanín’s works from these two periods—which we have been told to see as diametrically opposed (emotion vs. analysis, gesture vs. measure)—there is nevertheless something that transcends their formal differences and draws both periods together in common cause. Uniting her art across the decades is an idiosyncratic sensibility that employs dramatic tonal contrasts to evoke intimations of spiritual sentience. While Sanín has said on numerous occasions that her art is non-objective, “…free of any reference to external reality…,” when pressed, she will reveal that there are always two implicit subjects: self and spirit.

As a child, Sanín’s early introduction to art consisted in copying illustrations of old masters from her parents’ books. She has cited as another important early influence: Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), in which the pioneering Russian artist advocated for self-contained visual abstraction that aspired to the spiritual condition of music. “Color,” Kandinsky wrote, “is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” Indeed, there is something undeniably musical in Sanín’s color progressions, harmonies, and tonic scales, and these characteristics are evident in her early as well as her late work, albeit expressed in different formal idioms. Yet, rather than referencing music, or aspiring to its particular condition, what Sanín has achieved is a uniquely visual corollary to music and its spiritual affect.

The most constant visual characteristic uniting Sanín’s work across her early and late periods is chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark across the surface of her compositions. This effect is strikingly evident throughout a wide range of her work, from the 1960s to the present. While other abstract painters have employed tonal contrasts, few have done so with the instinct for emotional power that Sanín possesses. Indeed, it is precisely this quality of chiaroscuro, of a glimmering, spectral heat radiating in a coal-black void, that produces such a powerful spiritual sensation in her works.

Fanny Sanín was born in Colombia and first exhibited her paintings there in the prestigious Salon Nacionale de Artistas (1962, ’63, and ’66). It was in Monterrey, Mexico, however, that she produced her first major body of work, a series of large-scale abstract oil paintings. These paintings, made between 1964 and 1966, reveal an artist with a coherent and powerful vision characterized by a balance between highly considered, structured forms and vibrant, almost turbulent energy. In these works, large painterly masses jostle for position while between and betwixt these jumbled shapes occur incidents suggestive of organic, geological, or mechanical organization. Their vortex-like compositions direct the viewer’s eye from a swirl of interlocking shapes to a captivating central punctum. In these respects, her works from this period recall the paintings of Eva Hesse, Nicolas de Staël, and her friend, the Mexican painter Manuel Felguérez. However, unique to Sanín’s work is a mastery of tonal variation, a quality of chiaroscuro, that leads the viewer to experiences of poetic mystery and metaphysical depth.

In speaking of Sanín’s work as possessing the quality of chiaroscuro, I am not referring to the shadowy tonal modelling of the High Renaissance by which the contours of the body were neatly defined, but to the compositional chiaroscuro of the Baroque in which dark spaces and their dramatis personae were illuminated by a single, often spiritual source of light. The central panel of Peter Paul Rubens’ triptych Elevation of the Cross (1610-11) and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1620-21) exemplify this type while also embodying the muscular dynamism of forms resolving to a central point that characterizes Sanín’s paintings of the mid-1960s.