Edgar Sanchez Cumbas in his West Tampa studio. Photo: MV

Over the weekend, I visited with Edgar Sanchez Cumbas, an artist who lives and works in West Tampa. Last month, he created a large-scale abstract painting for Creative Loafing’s annual Sensory Overload art-music-performance bash—but it wasn’t just the idea of a new painting that caught my interest when I heard about the project; it was the artist’s unusual process. A week before the event, Sanchez sequestered himself in an empty warehouse (a former martial arts training facility) on the newspaper’s property and painted in solitude for days on end. When I spoke to him in advance of the experience, he was looking forward to responding to the space’s visceral—and, literally, bloody—quality.

I didn’t get to see the final product until this weekend, when Sanchez lifted a few panels out of storage in his studio and staged an impromptu partial reconstruction of the piece for me. I also watched the phenomenal video produced by Tampa Digital Studios that commemorates his time in the warehouse. (Now you can watch it, too, on YouTube.)

Sanchez is the featured artist this month at ArtHouse 3rd Thursday, an intimate rotating exhibition held at the private residence of art consultant Katherine Gibson. (Actually, he was last month’s artist, but he’s been held over for May due to demand.)

The paintings on view at Gibson’s home continue the gritty exploration taken up in the Sensory Overload project. For the first time in his career, Sanchez is working with a completely abstracted style. And though the paintings at ArtHouse are mostly small to medium in size, his latest paintings (seen behind him, in progress, in the photo above) are also bigger than ever. It’s as though Sanchez, who trained as an illustrator at Savannah College of Art and Design, has unlocked his inner Jackson Pollock (by way of Matthew Ritchie and Francis Bacon).

Physically, his process has become more demanding. (Watch him engage the canvas like a dancer—or a boxer—in the video.) At first glace, it seems the figures and landscapes of past paintings have disappeared. Really, they’ve exploded, littering the canvas with the skeletal black frames of warped structures, deconstructed patches of skin-tone color, and calligraphic drippings of bright red. Quite the visual onslaught from a painter who formerly explored Buddhist detachment in figurative paintings. But I don’t want to overstate the violence of the canvases; despite a sense of their world coming apart at the seams, the paintings transport the viewer to a space of contemplation from which to regard the disintegration.

For Sanchez, the paintings reflect a current cultural zeitgeist obsessed with race—particularly through his investigations of skin-tone, the patches of pink, beige, brown, yellow, etc., he applies to the canvas in abstract form. Are we really beyond a moment when the shade of someone’s skin, i.e., color, triggers a whole host of preconceptions about him or her in an instant? (Are we “post-race,” to use a term popular in recent months?) Don’t imagine it could possibly be that simple, the paintings suggest.

Enough rambling from me. Check out the show Thursday evening. Paintings by Sanchez will be joined by sculptures by Rocky Bridges.

ArtHouse 3rd Thursday
Thurs., May 15, 6-8 p.m. (or by appointment through June 5)
3709 Barcelona St., Tampa
813-831-8858