VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

view of painting; they are technically much more polished than his preceding work; one sees in them
the hand of a painter in command of the resources of his trade; but the approach and execution are
a classic example of an orthodox academic exercise.
This same technical skill is evident in the murals painted for the “Parador” at Arrecife in 1950; as
proof, in fact, of his technical skill, he even included a number of rather naive trompe-l’oeil that afford a sense
of relief, depth and spillover (leaves blown beyond the limits of the composition, poles that move towards
the viewer and disappear in the horizon, etc.), whose sensationalist effects irremediably attract the viewer’s
attention. The three vignettes that comprise the mural (the central La pesca (Fishing), flanked by Viento en
La Geria (Wind in La Geria) and La vendimia (Grape harvest), are a narrative and symbolic continuum, not
devoid of classical theatricality (the presence of curtains on either ends of the composition underscore this
concept). There is some good painting in all this (his own unique self-portrait, from behind); but generally
speaking the work is a mere standard rendition of a conventional theme.
The stylistic progress in Manrique’s painting can be established if we compare this mural to the
one done three years later for the Guacimeta Airport, also on Lanzarote. The elements appearing in
the new work are exactly the same in the earlier painting: the worlds of the island’s fishermen and
peasants (volcanoes, camels, cactus, prickly pear groves, small boats, palm trees, women, homes, etc.),
but form, organisation and representation are totally different: the painting is flat, the drawing is wisely
childlike, the colours are arbitrarily distributed, the planes of the different scenes overlap
discontinuously; all the figurative signs are subordinate to the plastic rhythm imposed by colour, here
bright and vivid under the definitive influence of the magic of Atlantic light.
Manrique’s membership in the Cinema Research and Experiment Institute of Madrid and his trip
to Paris both took place between these two dates; the significance of these two biographical facts
must be stressed, because they provided the artist with a view of a plastic universe of a more
experimental nature than anything to which he had been exposed he had observed up to then and
brought him closer to a new manner of understanding and expressing art. These were also years when
he was in contact with artists (Farreras, Feito), critics (Manuel Conde) and galleries (Fernando Fe,
which he helped found) that worked with a new concept of art and defended the need for reform in
Spanish art.
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