Basque painter, artist, and poet, belonging to the figurative movement that emerged in Guipúzcoa in the late 1960s. Born in San Sebastián (1943), he died in that city on January 22, 1987, victim of a stroke, which put an end to an artistic and personal life marked by a civic and intellectual spirit of great personality and a painful inner life, the result of severe hemophilia that caused him countless worries throughout his life.
As a result of this personal situation, and as a consequence of that inner life weighed down by the pain of illness, his painting, sculpture, poems, and narrative literary work are a clear expression of that inner turmoil, which sometimes led him to claim that his work was nothing more than a permanent self-portrait. His relationship with painting began as a child, when, at the age of ten, he attended the classes given by the painter Ascensio Martiarena in San Sebastián, whose workshop-school was the fundamental training center for many painters from Guipúzcoa. Martiarena's was the only teaching that Carlos Sanz recognized, and he went so far as to say: “Don Ascensio advised me: draw everything you see; this lady, your feet, your hands, what you see from the balcony; go out into the street with your sketchbook and draw everything. Don Ascensio was a wonderful person” (1984).
Although he stopped painting from 1960 to 1964, from that date onwards he devoted his intellectual efforts to shaping a particular world, creating an art form in which abstraction was nothing more than a covert form of magical realism. Although his great interest was always in studying philosophy and literature, as this discipline did not exist during his years in San Sebastián, he opted to study law, in which he graduated. Over time, law became a marginal activity for him, as his illness required him to live a secluded life, which he devoted entirely to artistic and literary creation. The fact that he remained in his hometown to study, as he acknowledged on several occasions, provided him with an opportunity to create his work. In fact, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of a talented group of painters in Guipúzcoa, formally brought together around the Basque Painting Grand Prize, which was awarded in San Sebastián at the time. This group of young painters included Juan Luis Goenaga, Ramón Zurriarain, and Carlos Sanz himself, who made figurative art their common language. As recognized by the aesthetician Maya Aguiriano, who has studied this group in its spatial and temporal context, both these painters and Vicente Ameztoy and Marta Cárdenas—although the latter two would opt for a more pronounced realism—emerged temporarily in unison with other international movements, such as French New Realism.
“The elusive nuance,” Maya Aguiriano has written, "that defines where figuration ends and realism begins, so difficult and even impossible to pinpoint on many occasions, is the very fine thread on which Carlos Sanz's painting moves. What I am trying to explain is not a more or less accurate categorization, but a tension that is inherent in the painting itself, and which is so intrinsic to it that it owes its unmistakable personality to it."
Carlos Sanz, who ed his whole personality through his oil paintings, drawings, and collages (the latter being an expression he had a special fondness for in recent years), held several exhibitions in different Basque and Spanish cities. His last exhibitions took place at Galería 16 in San Sebastián (1984) and at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (1985), where he exhibited paintings and drawings from the 1978-1985 period. His first solo exhibition took place in 1967 at the Barandiarán Gallery in his hometown, a venue that became a meeting place for the most important artistic avant-garde and a focus of political awareness for many Basque citizens during those years. Sanz, who received various mentions and awards in different national competitions, won first prize in 1969 in the annual “Alavesa de Artes Plásticas” competition. In 1973, he received, ex-aequo, the first prize in the First Basque-Navarre Painting Competition, held in Bilbao. But while painting and sculpture (the latter manifested in small compositions, designed and created mainly from waste materials) were the channels of expression for his artistic concerns, Carlos Sanz's most notable passion was literature.
Having been exposed to a wide variety of literature since childhood, Sanz stated on many occasions that, if he had the opportunity to make a film or write a novel, he would stop painting. In a text of his, published in the magazine Kurpil (1974) to accompany a collection of drawings by the same author, Sanz emphatically expressed his preference for written work:
‘I paint because I like it,’ Carlos Sanz said at the time, "perhaps more than anything else in the world. I paint because, despite a healthy and methodical distrust of myself, some critics, several colleagues, quite a few friends and perhaps an unforgivable mirage have encouraged me to persevere until now. But above all, I paint because I don't know how to do anything else... I mean, I don't feel the slightest pride in being a painter, good or bad... I mean that if I were able and capable of writing a novel or directing a film, I would stop painting, even if I considered myself the best painter in the world.‘ ’I have always tended to believe,‘ Sanz added at the time, ’that a chapter of a novel or a sequence of a film has more communicative power than ten paintings. And if there is one thing that true art has, above all else, it is communication."
Carlos Sanz left behind several short stories and a collection of poems, most of which were written in the late 1960s, when his personal and political conscience led him to join the Spanish Communist Party. As a member of this political party, he participated in the student and social movements opposing Franco's regime and, although he left the party before 1968, in 1977, with the first democratic elections, he expressed his intention to support the Basque communists. In 1979, he was part of a group of intellectuals who publicly called for support for the Statute of Autonomy of Gernika. His interest in political developments kept him constantly concerned about the present and future of Basque society. This concern was reflected in some narrative texts, in his personal diary, which he wrote throughout his life, and in the aforementioned poems. Some of these were translated into Basque by Gabriel Aresti and, although the author himself had little regard for them, his poetry is on a par with his pictorial work and clearly clarifies it, superimposing the planes of the same expression. Some of these poems have appeared in anthologies, such as the one published under the title 23, edited by Hórdago (1981). A member of the Guipúzcoa Artistic Association, of which he was the leader for a time, he participated in the development of a cultural environment in the 1960s through gatherings held at the aforementioned institution or in the ‘Espelunca’ cave. In recent years, he was a member of the board of directors of the Ateneo Guipuzcoano. The Provincial Council of Guipúzcoa has prepared a book entitled Carlos Sanz, por dentro, which will provide an insight into the rich and complex artistic personality of this Basque painter and creator.
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