VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

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The universe illustrated in the Guacimeta mural, a sort of island inventory, was also depicted by
Manrique on smaller works (nearly always monotypes on paper and a few oil paintings), which he
painted with even greater freedom and audacity than the mural. Given the nature of fragments as
intimate and private experiments, they were better suited than large public compositions, designed
for mass public view, to the inclusion of expressive assays and the use of surprise and its effects. Works
such as Desnudo azul (Blue nude) (1953) or Noche de malpaís (Night in the badlands) (1954) were a
culmination of the way that Manrique had learned to translate the reality of the island of Lanzarote,
so distant from the callow folkloric approach of his apprenticeship and at the same time closer to the
genuine identity of the landscape and the local peoples.
Matisse and Picasso were unquestionably the two artists who influenced his work most during
this stage; from the former he borrowed the exultant freedom of colour, its use as an independent
value, sufficient in itself to express emotion (emotion that was always sunny, vital, vivid) as a translation
of an optimistic outlook on existence. From Picasso he inherited the free and easy approach to
drawing, scenic composition subject to no external rules, but only to the internal demands of the
painting itself.
These paintings must have astonished the opaque artistic world of nineteen-fifties Madrid;
Manrique’s monotypes must have dazzled eyes used to seeing a grey, dull type of art that reflected
misery, ruin and abandon (environments portrayed by the nascent Madrid School, Eduardo Vicente, etc.,
or established artists such as Benedito, Sotomayor, Sert, and others), art that was a reflection on a
wretched Spain, impoverished by the war and the unending post-war. They may be thought to bear a
certain resemblance to Francisco Cossio’s - a painter much esteemed by Manrique - works, or
Benjamín Palencia’s; but the aesthetic refinement in the former’s still-lifes, which while transparent
lacked the bright joy of Manrique’s scenes, and the monotonous insistence in Palencia’s paintings on a
single theme, rural life, along with its treatment - with thick and aggressive pigment - and its characters,
peasants whose gesture and expression convey a certain underlying squalor, clearly distinguish them
from the Atlantic paradise that Manrique painted with such impulsive exultation 5 . The respective
meaning in these works also differed: while one advocated the refined and secret intimacy of interiors
(still lifes) and the other rural aggressiveness (in colour and gesture), Manrique proposed the carefree
poetry of life under the sun with the cool breeze of the sea either present or close enough to sense.
5. In any event, Palencia did not reveal his colourist
tendencies until approximately 1950. “His austere
landscapes” says José Hierro, referring to the change that
took place in Palencia’s work towards the end of the
forties, “ignited, burst into a flame of unreal colour. (...)
Contrast was to replace the nuance in the colourist’s
approach”. Artes, Madrid, May-June, 1970.