I have known for several days. We waited for the foundation’s official publication, where it is formally announced that Leticia Sánchez Toledo has been awarded once again. This time, by the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.

As many know, Leticia is a figurative visual artist who works primarily in oil on canvas. Through its decision, the foundation supports one of the projects she currently has in development. These are large-scale paintings that probe the emotional dimensions of everyday life, with particular attention to the relationship between individuals, their environments, and the silent narratives that unfold in both public and private spaces.

Almost all of her poetics moves along paths of this kind. Each of her projects attempts to condense the subjective particularities of groups of subjects —or protagonists— whom she has managed to isolate from environments of social interaction. The differences, within the similarities, of unknown people who carry into public space the character they consider safest in order to avoid drawing attention or, in some cases, to draw it precisely.

Of course, she does not give the same treatment to the portraits of her closest friends, to other public figures, to artists like herself, or to her family. Each of these affective presences demands a different gaze, a singular implication. And all of them are approached from a female perspective, as is natural and inevitable. If they share anything, it is the poetic patina of their daily experience, their emotional depth. One that Leticia intuits and incorporates through direct observation and through intuition.

I have seen cases in which her models remain on the canvas exposed in ways they never would be in real life. That is one of the capacities in her work that most draws my attention. Psychological accuracies that language may be unable to explain. Perhaps because no tongue can describe that almost infinite register of human emotional states. Leticia half-opens a window onto the most primary functioning of human intuition, in its prelinguistic layer. Almost as a form of bodily, affective, and anticipatory cognition, one that comes from deep time, as an orientation incorporated from the environment, absorbed by consciousness, narrated by language, and transformed into plastic experience.

The bond between the individual and the space they inhabit is what forms the psychic texture. In any case, Leticia builds a bridge of empathy. One she possibly could not sustain in a real interaction, paradoxically, because, like everyone else, she responds to her own repertoire, also incorporated from secure relational arguments.

If oil painting has one virtue —among many others— it is its capacity to slow the transit from remembered emotion to its representation on canvas. This delay contrasts with the agility with which she resolves domestic matters. We know that nothing that can be said about this genre will be new. Almost nothing is. For that reason, and for me, Leticia’s figurations are like ‘seasonal’ figurations, belonging to the moment and space she has been given to live. A full understanding of art as result cannot ignore the understanding of the person, of the artist and her circumstances —which we share from similar origins and culture— inscribed onto the physical plane by a cosmic and primordial sentence.

I understand that this foundation grants her this award —which is, in truth, a recognition and a firm wager— for what we have just affirmed.

Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation

The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation is one of the most specific, demanding, and symbolically revealing private foundations within the international ecosystem of grants for emerging artists. It was founded in Montreal in 1955 by the lawyer and amateur artist Charles Glass Greenshields, in memory of his mother. It was born with an aesthetically clear purpose: to support young figurative or representational artists at a time when modernism and the abstract avant-gardes dominated much of the international artistic discourse.

To this day, its mission remains equally precise and restrictive. This is not a grant for ‘visual arts’ in general, but an instrument of support for technical formation, craft, the discipline of the body, the figure, observation, and the material construction of the image. It seeks to sustain the continuity of traditional media. It does not reward trends or expansive curatorial discourses, and it excludes fields such as photography, video, film, digital art, graphic design, illustration, decorative arts or craft, and, very explicitly, abstract or non-objective art. That precision is exactly what gives it considerable weight.

Its grants are substantial for a young artist. The first grant is CAD $17,000, and the second and third grants, when applicable, are CAD $20,000 each. Applications are received throughout the year, with no deadline, which reinforces its character as ongoing support rather than episodic calls.

The importance of the foundation, beyond its monetary award, lies in its capacity for international legitimization. To receive it is a recognition of professional seriousness for artists in training or at an early stage, because it implies that an institution with nearly seven decades of history recognizes talent and the possibility of a sustained career.

Its prestige is also confirmed by its roster of recipients, Jenny Saville among them, who received support from the Foundation in 1993 and 1996 and has publicly acknowledged that this support was fundamental in allowing her to concentrate on her painting at an early moment in her career.

In synthesis, although the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation is conservative in orientation, its reach is truly international, and it is certainly influential in the field of contemporary figuration. It defends, as stated above —within a contemporary art system that privileges the conceptual, the expanded, the technological, and the discursive— an idea of art grounded in mastery of craft, representation, and the historical continuity of classical media.