Please join us at the Opening Reception for Ramiro and Melissa Franklin Sanchez's exhibition of recent works from 6pm - 7:30pm on Saturday, August 29th. The show will hang until September 13th.
Ramiro (b.1974) and Melissa Franklin Sanchez (b.1984) live and paint together in Florence, Italy. Both classically trained, they draw and paint from life. Ramiro has been showing with Grenning Gallery since its inception in 1997, and he has now become quite established in our local andinternational community of collectors and artists. Franklin Sanchez has created a niche in the market with jewel like intimate paintings on copper in the last few years.
In Ramiro's 2015 painting 'Nude', the viewer cannot see who the model is but the painting exudes an intimacy suggesting a closeness to the painter that can not immediately be explained. Ramiro paints from life, painstakingly searching for accuracy beyond the physical, in order to convey the psyche of the sitter. The painter's ability to draw the personality from his model is akin to that of John Singer Sargent. "Sonnet" a large vertical by Ramiro depicts a woman in a whimsical red flower-printed dress, reading poetry in the foreground of a bright blue sky. Clouds form and billow in a sky that was once clear, created by the thoughts of this young woman as she reads poetry.
Franklin Sanchez achieves the same intimacy through the level of detail in her depictions of interiors, as seen in "Vase", 2014 and "Winter Sun", 2015. These are reminiscent of the domesticity of the 17th Century Dutch Masters, both in appearance and method. Franklin Sanchez is one of our few artists that paint oil on copper. The warm and cozy interiors give us snapshots into their lives together, from the inside of their apartment to Ramiro backlit as he plays his violin. "Magnolia", 2015, on the other hand, is painted more loosely resulting in a lovely impressionistic composition.
The show is a combination of portraits, interiors and landscapes and shows a dynamic creative interaction between husband and wife. Since both are capable of switching gears between the exacting and the impressionist, they provide Grenning Gallery's collectors once again with a quality of painting that is unparalleled.
Thoughts by the staff of Grenning Gallery, 2015
