Brian Sánchez was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1987. The apparent festivity in Brian Sánchez's work belies a profound sadness. His painting shatters the illusory and Cartesian balance in things, the serenity of eternal sleep, demagoguery, and grandiloquence. Like the Annunciation, he excises through his message the promise of peace. His canvases are openings to a legend or a stained glass window. The figuration is obsessive, almost baroque. His painting is compulsive, intense, confined only by the walls erected by the frames. There is no rational evidence in his narrative; everything seems consumed by a deep longing, a desire that, spilled onto the canvas surface, intends to obliterate every trace that does not dignify the gravity. It is astonishing how Brian Sánchez constructs a visuality devoid of intersections, fillings, juxtapositions, or intervals. Brian Sánchez's work is also a perpetual struggle with memory and its associated powers. As the simulator he is, transcending the deepest desires, he achieves through his painting a power of awe. Timelessness—like that of the Garden—settles in and infests the already tragic sense of our existence with melancholy. Brian Sánchez, like Barbara, contemplates in ecstasy the strange elegance of those who have already died, unaware they have crossed the threshold.