VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

34. John Bernard Myers, op. cit.
35. Lázaro Santana, op. cit.
36. John Bernard Myers, op. cit.
possibilities he inferred from his Parisian experience, not with Kandinsky, but with Mondrian.
“Mondrian was to mean to him what cubism meant to Gorky [...].These early canvases are indicative
of his passion for constructivism, order, elimination, despite his apparently misty and transparent
imagery” 34 . Lázaro Santana believes that this is “abstract constructivism, similar to what Farreras,
Feito, Labra, Mampaso, Sempere, Planasdurá, etc., were doing at the time” 35 . I, in turn, would add that
I also feel that the influence of another artist was equally important, namely Alberto Burri, a painter
who had already explored the possibilities of burlap, certain material-like monochromes similar to
those with which Manrique would assert his artistic personality in the sixties and who, perhaps less
curiously than may seem, had already lit fire to his early Combustions. This law of fire in painting would
also be invoked by Yves Klein in the early sixties. One of the last paintings of this series was used as
a background for the most important collective exhibition of the period for Manrique, the Jeune
peinture espagnole (young Spanish painting) showing held in Freiburg in 1959.
Madrid – New York
John B. Myers tells us that by 1953 Manrique had already “begun to use a mixture of casein,
rubber and varnish, a medium which, while difficult to apply, yielded rich and unusual effects. He also
used the most recent plastic pigments” 36 .
The documents showing what the mural at Barajas Airport looked like are indicative of the deep
and sudden change that had taken place in Manrique’s painting, which continued to metamorphose, to
reach what thereafter became, with minimal albeit significant variations, his personal and distinct style:
painting that is sheer material in the embodiment of pictorial determination.
The earliest pieces in this long period date from the latter months of 1959. They may be
described as the extension of things material - in addition to the ones referred above, a long list of
others from akil and other glues to lye, sand and other oxidisable soil, etc. - mixed on the surface of
the canvas, which one assumes was in a horizontal position - such as in Pollock and Motherwell -.
Jackson Pollock’s working methods, in particular his decision to lay his canvases on the floor and
dripping paint over them, are perhaps the most universally known of all those fathered outside
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