03
Javier García sáchez

Title: Songs from the Bardo
Artist: Javier Garcia Sanchez
Medium: Natural Pigments on Handmade Lokta Paper
Year: 2025 
Size: Various

Email: equisgarcia@gmail.com
Instagram: @equisgarcia

The Process: 

Javier García Sáchez made all of these pieces in Kathmandu, Nepal. Having gone there specifically to understand the world of thangka painting and to work directly with a master, learning the process of making devotional images that support meditation practice.

His mornings were spent in a traditional workshop, working with his teacher on a thangka of the Buddha. The process is very concentrated: first you study the object of meditation, then you meditate on it, and eventually you paint what you have learned to see.

In the evenings, he would go to my own studio and work on these paintings. Before starting, he would spend time with a death meditation. Not as a meditation on death alone, but as a practice for living. Thinking about all the transitions in his own life: his path, where he lived, different versions of himself, and what it means to move through change.

He would try to get into the feeling of things around him dissolving, and practice becoming comfortable with that dissolution. Many of the works were made over many days. Pouring water and pigment onto handmade Nepali paper and allow it to move, overflow, dry, and change rather than trying to control exactly what would happen.
The process became a kind of practice in itself: looking, surrendering, waiting, and learning to let go.

His one rule: Delay judgment.

Not deciding too quickly whether something is good or bad, finished or unfinished. With these paintings especially, he wanted to allow the work to become what it was going to become before deciding what he thought about it.

Because there is so much water involved, the paintings continue changing after he had made the initial marks. Pigment moves, pools, dries, disappears, and sometimes creates something he could never have planned.

So the rule became less about controlling the image and more about giving it enough time for something unexpected to appear.

He works at different stages of wetness, so the way the pigment moves depends on how wet the paper is, how much water is present, how it dries, and things I can't completely control.

The finished pieces can look very quiet, but the process is actually quite physical and messy. He tends to move very carefully and gently around the work, and then has to step back and allow the materials to do something of their own.

A large part of the practice has been learning to appreciate what happens when something doesn't follow his plan.

Sometimes he has a feeling that a piece is complete, but often he needs to live with it for a few days, sometimes weeks

Sometimes he realizes that something he thought was unfinished was actually finished already. It just needed time to live through those moments.

Sometimes he brings a piece back into the studio and works with it again. Even keeping pieces that he can break apart and use to make something new.

Before this exhibition, he spent the night before the opening consecrating the works and signing them with a blessing on the back, following the tradition of thangka painting.

In his words “That ritual felt important to me before the works entered the museum housing the best of Nepali sacred art, a collection of Buddhist, Hindu, and Newari art (Patan Museum).”


The Piece: 

This series is about letting things disappear, including all the stories about myself.

Javier wanted them to feel movement, possibility, and change.

Some of the works are made on extremely thin paper, and there is a fragility to them that he hopes might make someone reflect on fragility in their own life, and on the preciousness of this human life as a whole. In addition he hopes there is a pull of curiosity. A feeling of wanting to look more closely, to dive deeper, and perhaps to appreciate the changing that is already happening.

He want his pieces to create enough space for the audience to notice something within themselves.

Over the last few years, and especially through his time in Kathmandu, he has realized that there is very little distinction between his artwork and the other parts of my life.

That has brought some doubt and questioning, while also feeling very liberating. To let go of the labels and boxes around art, practice, teaching, work, and everything else.

He tries to bring all of it into the work: his career, his travels, his studies, his meditation practice, his experiences, and his own struggles. Not really see these as separate things anymore.

It was very important to Javier that these works were made with the land he was living in. He wanted to work with local materials, to honor the place, the teachers who came before him, and the traditions he was learning from without bypassing them.

Working with handmade Nepali lokta paper, brushes made in Nepal, and pigments I sourced there. He also worked closely with the artisans who make these materials, and feels deeply grateful for the people whose knowledge and labor made the work possible.

For him, this is also part of the meaning of the work: recognizing that none of us creates alone.


The Theme: 

Consciousness is present in all of these pieces and in the series as a whole.

The work is a journey of letting go and surrendering, and of becoming more intimate with the consciousness that he experiences as being at the source of everything.

That is also why the series eventually arrives at the two white thangkas with almost nothing on them. The movement through the works is not toward adding more and more, but toward dissolution. Allowing things to fall away until there is almost nothing left to represent.

The absence of imagery at the end is not meant to represent emptiness as a lack. It is an invitation to look at what remains when everything else has been allowed to dissolve.