VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

39. Lázaro Santana, op. cit.
40. The sudden death of his partner Josefa (Pepi) Gómez
in 1963 left Manrique, according to all those who knew him,
emotionally destitute.
41. Lázaro Santana, op. cit.
42. Lázaro Santana, op. cit.
43. John Bernard Myers, op. cit.
plant or animal life but, for the time being, everything is mineral, the existence of man is nowhere
acknowledged, no graphic sign testifies to human presence. There is only matter, enclosed in its own
solitude, attesting only to itself, ceaselessly creating itself as a self-sufficient being, abiding by certain
aesthetic rules of its own to occupy all voids in ways suited to nature” 39 .
Towards mid-decade, when he had reached a position of certain privilege among the more
successful domestic artists and, like his colleagues, had participated in the international dissemination
of Spanish art - with official or semi-official support -, when he had reaped concrete and specific
recognition in the form of awards and purchases for international collections, Manrique - very likely
urged on by painful personal circumstances 40 - moved to New York, where he would live on and off
from 1964 to 1968, year of his definitive return to Lanzarote. The various analysts of his oeuvre
concur that this intermittent period in New York was essential to his artistic and personal
development. Lázaro Santana even sustains that Manrique regarded those years as the “richest of his
entire life” 41 . I am not so sure. By the time Manrique went to New York, his artistic domain,
abstraction, in the form of either European material art informel or American abstract expressionism,
had ceased to be the predominant tendency on the market - that was the year that José Guerrero
chose to return to Spain, under the conviction that pop art, then at the height of its popularity, had
decidedly won the day -.
As far as possible changes in his work are concerned, formally speaking they were scant. “He
pursued his work on canvas” wrote Lázaro Santana, “along the same lines as he had established
since 1960: at most, there was a slight change in the amount of material and the way it was
arranged, insofar as it receded, leaving more space on the canvas for smooth surfaces, painted with
bright, vivid colours” 42 Myers also noted this chromatic change and added that “Manrique did not
paint for two years. He would not go back to canvas painting until 1965, on his return from America.
[...] With regard to his new paintings, all done in New York with casein, paste and varnish reinforced
with acrylic paint, they differed from the previous works - not in content (theme and landscape
were still there), but in a totally renewed concept of colour and space -. New York unquestionably
had a considerable impact on Manrique and was very likely the source of his new colour scale. In
the 1965 canvases, colour has a very vivid tone and emits nearly metallic light, like the colours in
caves when the beam of a flashlight bounces off the quartz, basalt and mica” 43 .
189