Artist Talk: Camilo Sanin

Camilo Sanin grew up in Colombia until the age of 11 when he moved to DC. Growing up in DC in his father’s home there was always Latin American modernist art on the walls and his father cultivated in him an interest in art and the thoughts behind each piece. He says all of his pieces are simply reactions to his environment as well as the impulsive to paint and express what is happening around him. His work is all abstract but over the years he has changed from geometric shapes to lines to curves, exploring the effect of the orientation of the line as well as different formal elements including positive and negative space.

His work concentrates on the use of color and how it affects us and the emphasis of the idea. He wants his pieces to convey what he was thinking but is also interested in what others immediately think of when viewing his work. There is a certain consistency in his work, and end of one painting becomes the beginning of the next so that there is a kind of narrative that is apparent throughout his collections of paintings. By using color as a major force he is able to show a range of emotions just by incorporating certain colors from his environment. An example of this would be the muted colors in his paintings that were done whilst he was abroad in Oxford, England. It was winter and the colors surrounding him were all dull, and so his pieces incorporated this and made the viewer feel the kind of cold he must have.

What I found most interesting was listening to Camilo Sanin talking about abstract art as a whole. I am not a fan of abstract art and so I wasn’t sure whether I would be interested in his work, however he made me have a new appreciation for the abstract. He quoted someone saying that we should judge abstract art as we would an abstract idea - as its capacity to reveal new truth. This was interesting to me because I had always assumed abstract work had very little thought put into it and so I would automatically categorize it into the nonsense pile of “art” however thinking about the work as an idea and whether or not it is able to reveal something new is something that makes sense.

The unity found through fragmentation in Sanin’s work really made me think of architecture and how architectural ideas come in blocks and pieces. This was very powerful and the use of black and white as colors added to this greatly. The overlapping in his work creates an intriguing structure that draws the eye in and he successfully creates optical space by using layers on a very flat surface. All in all I enjoyed Sanin’s work because of the way it makes the eye dart to different areas of each painting, never really resting on one thing.