Andorran Artist Francisco Sánchez Opens Dream-Inspired Exhibition

Francisco Sánchez, an Andorran artist known for his metaphysical visions, opens a new exhibition today at Mama Maria gallery, running until 25 May. The dozen paintings, the result of two years' work, draw from his lucid dreams and premonitions of distant futures, blurring the boundaries between sleep and waking life.

A standout piece, *Y soñé que estaba despierta*, marks Sánchez's first foray into the human figure in his career. It depicts a young woman who has just awoken, projecting dream images through a window in a style reminiscent of Dalí's *Noia de la finestra*. The artist describes experiences where he gains awareness within dreams, navigating them with impossible clarity—moments he trains to induce regularly.

These visions form the exhibition's core theme: what if perceived reality is itself a vivid dream? Sánchez explores this through recurring motifs like towering monoliths, inspired by Kubrick's *2001: A Space Odyssey*, alongside derelict megastructures, train tracks, streetlights, and cyclopean ruins from unborn civilizations. He evokes futures glimpsed in altered states, such as NASA spacecraft from the 24th century submerged in Pacific depths or the rock of Enclar severed by human hands, with Sant Vicenç perched atop it.

Colour appears discreetly for the first time: red accents a triptych, *Estructuras en el mundo de los sueños deseados*, showing vast empty chambers from megalomaniac dreams; blue dominates *Meditación sobre fondo azul* and *La mística de la llum*, an unusual landscape of Tristaina's second lake at dawn, where the moon lingers as sunlight breaks and shadows ripple across the water.

Sánchez's technique remains distinctive—more drawing than painting, using charcoal, white, and black, with erasure to reveal nocturnal apparitions. Works like *La cara oculta* and *Organismo pétreo* present eroded structures shaped by cataclysms or eons, echoing H.R. Giger's xenomorphs or Escher's impossible staircases, inspired by stone ripples in a lake mimicking DNA's double helix. *Paisaje onírico* captures jagged mountains, black birds circling a monolithic totem in a shamanic rite.

Each canvas acts as a portal to another dimension, cementing Sánchez's reputation as Andorra's most esoteric painter, blending Chirico's metaphysics with Blake's mysticism—and venturing into nightmares too.