Victor Sánchez is 54 years old, has been a priest for 15 years, and describes himself as passionate about iconography. "I have been doing this kind of painting for about 20 years." His "collection" consists of a hundred paintings distributed all over the world.
Fr. Sánchez combines two vocations. "I really enjoy working with wood, I consider myself a craftsman," he says. But in his mind and heart, concern for children also always remains. The catechetical space motivates and excites him. If there is one thing Fr. Sánchez constantly thinks about, it is "how to reach young people through art?" He tries to do this, for example, with the boys and girls of the Salesian University Residence in Cordoba, whom he accompanies and listens to on a daily basis.
However, when the priest gets to work, it is usually because he has received a request. "People ask me for prayers and they pass me biblical texts from which I focus in prayer on an image, a situation... Each icon has a prayer work before, during, and after." So rather than a type of art, iconography is constituted as a way of praying.
The first icon he painted on the occasion of the canonization of the nurse saint is of Zatti learning the art of healing, "looking at how this saint invites us to live the charism starting from the urgency of helping those who need care the most."
Inspired by Psalm 30, the icon is meant to represent Zatti's experience from the Salesian charism. "I feel that he made a whole journey of consecration to God, but he also found it in the faces of children and the poor, which is very characteristic of our charism."
The image evokes a mountain road as this is the symbolic place of the encounter with God. Next to Zatti is a teenage Jesus, dressed in blue and red. A "Jesus" - just as Zatti considered each of his patients - painted with the colors of his divinity and humanity; adolescent because Zatti retraces Don Bosco's experience: "finding God in young people."
The artist also explains that "being God's medicine means letting Jesus accompany us. It is He who teaches us to heal, to heal the hearts of children: to go and heal, but also to let oneself be healed." This is the experience that he had as a priest and that St. Artemide Zatti also had: "Zatti goes to embrace the sick child and young patient, but he also lets himself be healed by God."
Br. Zatti, Jesus' Good Samaritan, is the second painting about the new Salesian saint. Inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37), it invites people to renew their gaze. In the place of the wounded man is Jesus himself: but how can this be, if it is He who comes to the rescue?
Fr. Sánchez responds with simplicity: the text ends like this, "Go and you too do the same. In other words, we are all invited to be Samaritans. Sometimes we may say 'I draw near to suffering' but in truth, I am still distant. No, even pain should be welcomed, supported, and relieved."
The painting grew out of a catechesis by Francis. The Pope spoke about how to be a Samaritan based on charity and mercy. These words lingered in the Salesian artist's memory and heart until he was able to capture them in form and color.
"Charity in terms of inner love, but also to go out to meet and show mercy to others. To contemplate them, but also to take charge of that pain. Because if we do not take care of the pain of others, perhaps the charism remains only good intentions. And this is precisely where, as Zatti performs the action of having mercy toward Jesus, he also feels that he is the object of His mercy."
They once told Zatti that for reasons of space and resources they could only accommodate 30 sick people. He replied, "And if the 31st is Jesus, what do I do?"
This is why Fr. Sánchez adds, "It's about asking what happens to those we leave out, those who don't arrive, those who don't come under our gaze."
The image is broken by the presence of a child and a young man. "The recipients of the charism," the artist concludes, "Don Bosco's charism is nourished by the medicine that comes from children. Today we are frightened by many youth realities, but we also learn new things. To heal, to sustain. This convalescent Jesus is sustained by the children."
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