VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

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factors together and each one separately - to generate an atmosphere of ignorance and confusion
that surrounded the youngest artists early on in their careers, who were left to their own devices and
intuition. Manrique was no exception to this general rule; he lived through this experience in Madrid
beginning in 1945 and much of his painting is a reflection on these patterns. Peculiarly, at around the
same time, the attempts to invigorate Spanish art arose in peripheral cities - the Pórtico group in
Zaragoza, Dau-al-Set in Barcelona, the Altamira School in Santander -, or even further away, in Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria, with the Ladac group.
Manrique was unusual, however, in the context of plastic artists in one way: he enrolled in formal
schooling at a rather late age - he was 26 when, in 1945, he began his studies at the San Fernando
Fine Art School. By that time he had already held a number of solo exhibitions in both Arrecife and
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. His submission for five consecutive years to academic discipline (he
earned his professor’s degree from the school itself in 1950), must have done very little to drive his
progress in a “modern” direction (I use this term because it was very dear to Manrique; he never used
the more precise, although temporary and therefore more contingent and changing expression, avantgarde),
although it did afford him an excellent technical background to which he would not have had
access through self-training. The fact that Manrique consented to study fine art when he was already
an artist with a career under way is due, I believe, to two factors: one, his desire for a first-hand
knowledge of new environments that would expand his precarious insular experience, both personally
and artistically; and two, to learn pictorial techniques and procedures that would help him better
express what he had done until then. Although these studies were not wholly to his liking, and in his
later recollections would even refer to them in a rather angry tone, thanks to this training and the
occasion it afforded to live in Madrid, he was able to find himself as an artist, something that he would
very likely have never achieved had he remained in Lanzarote.
Manrique felt the call of the “artist” from the time he could reason. By artist he meant someone
different, able to perceive and experiment reality differently from those around him. This aptitude filled
him with secret joy but it troubled him as well. More than once he wondered whether he was an
“oddball” because he wanted and did things that his playmates had absolutely no interest in (that
frankly bored them): observing stones with unusual shapes, admiring the colours of a flower, following
the winding course or spasmodic leaps of insects... Manrique’s artistic sensitivity was surfacing and he