VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

4. Eugenio Carmona, “Materias creando un paisaje.
Benjamín Palencia, Alberto Sánchez y el ‘reconocimiento
estético’ de la naturaleza agraria. 1930-1933”, cat.
El surrealismo en España, Queen Sofia National
Art Centre Museum, Madrid, 1994.
formulations in the person of Maruja Mallo -, who combined a passion for their personal abode on
earth with a dark delight in eschatology and the certainty that what human beings carry through life
is largely fossilised. Eugenio Carmona called it “an aesthetic conception of rural nature” 4 , other
specialists term it “earthly surrealism” and in a way, neither is very far from the definitions that might
be sought for Manrique’s mature oeuvre.
When he finished his studies five years later, in 1950, he began what was up to that time his most
ambitious and coherent work, the murals on the National Parador or Inn at Arrecife, in which
specialists have identified the influence of Picasso and Matisse and, especially, a functional and very
naturalistic understanding of colour. His brief membership soon after in the Institute of Cinema
Research and Experimentation proved to be very fruitful. After a transition period, whose results may
be described as what José María Moreno Galván called “figurative eclecticism”, his work gradually
turned, as did the oeuvre of other young avant-garde painters of his times, towards abstraction. He was
predisposed to take this direction both by a series of events in Spain and a trip to Paris - with his
friend and fellow painter Francisco Farreras - which was his first opportunity for first-hand contact
with the work of the classic artists of modernity and with what was being done by young painters as
well as by artists who had reached creative maturity.
What was it that Manrique found in Paris? On the one hand, the classic presence of Picasso and
Matisse, who had reached the category of unquestioned masters, towered in the horizon; and on the
other, the personality of Francis Bacon, which had emerged just as the war ended, reigned in
figuration.
As far as abstraction is concerned, since before the end of the war, Jean Fautrier had already been
experimenting with his thick and sensual pastes - which he would use both in a certain sorrowful
neofiguration and in purely abstract works -; Wols, in the brief period between the end of the war and
his death in 1951 had artfully drawn the broad lines of tachism that others would later follow - Georges
Mathieu, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Jean Bazaine or Jean Michel Atlan among them -.
Two characteristics, identified by Edward Lucie-Smith, of the majors of European lyrical
abstraction of the fifties, seem to me to be highly pertinent for an understanding of Manrique: their
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