I n Tomás Sánchez’s Nube baja desde la montaña, a panoramic vista of unending jungle and flatland unrolls before the viewer. Sánchez summons an elliptical cloud, whose contours mimic the curvature of the hills at the foreground, over verdant and impossibly lush vegetation. Every leaf and stone is accounted for, not a branch left unperfected. Painted with astonishing exactitude, the present work is a monumental example of Sánchez’s acclaimed landscapes.

Nube baja desde la montaña was executed in the early years of the global success he began to enjoy in the 1980s. Born in 1948 to a family of agricultural laborers in Aguada de Pasajeros, a village in central Cuba, Sánchez began his training in 1964 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and continued his studies at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana. He was expelled, however, in 1970, on the grounds that his spiritual beliefs were antithetical to the nation’s Communist ideology. Now an outcast, Sánchez couldn’t be celebrated in the same way as the Cuban avant-gardes the generation earlier, but this changed in 1980 when one of his paintings was smuggled out of the country and into Spain, where he won the Joan Miró Foundation’s International Prize of Drawing. Sánchez would be catapulted into the global limelight, going on to win in 1984 the Amelia Peláez Award for painting at the inaugural Havana Biennial.

Sánchez has cited myriad sources of inspiration in the formation of his artistic ethos, of which European Romanticism, particularly the work of Caspar David Friedrich, is one. Both artists document and bear witness to the great miracle of nature and the marriage of the soul with the spirit of the world around. Sánchez’s fascination with this quietude felt in the presence of the sublime came, too, from reading Walt Whitman’s transcendental poetry and Medieval religious texts. In his work, one finds themselves transported to mist-blanketed oases, awestruck by the paradisiac vastness of untouched rivers and inlets, jungles and oceans. Sánchez tames wilderness into perfect harmony, a fictive place where clouds mimic the geometry of the plains below, and where hills roll in symmetric waves. His sprawling landscapes also recall the 19th century obsession with the earthly splendor and enormity of the Americas, and his work, in its grand scale and meticulous detail, participates in a dialogue with members of the Hudson River School.

The experience of viewing Nube baja desde la montaña is a contemplative, pensive one, a product of Sánchez’s other great influence: meditation, the very practice that triggered his exile in 1976 and caused him to spend his life working between Costa Rica and the United States. He has described his landscapes as compositions born out of his imagination, and, undoubtedly, his memories. The present work’s sheer scale absorbs the viewer into the drama of Sánchez’s dreamscape, but set against the artist’s fraught relationship with his homeland and the deforestation of his native Cuba, the present work becomes all the more dreamlike, even haunting—a somber remembrance of a land’s past. This picture of abundance captures a place only scarcely accessible to him.

Figures seldom appear in Sánchez’s work, and if there are, they are usually meditating, alone and facing away from the viewer. Without even the suggestion of mankind in the present work, we become the only human to behold the fantasy woven into each detail of Sánchez’s landscape. The poetry of his practice lies in the dissonance between Sánchez’s hyperrealistic style and the subject’s divorce from reality. “His paintings may, on one level, represent metaphors for a paradise long-lost to humanity,” art historian Edward J. Sullivan writes, “On another plane, they may be analyzed as allegories of the Cuban landscape–dreams of a place which may never be re-captured, even in memory” (Edward J. Sullivan, Tomás Sánchez (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1999, p. 2).