VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

50. Fernando Castro, “Aproximación a César Manrique”,
cat. Manrique, Galería Leyendecker, Santa Cruz
de Tenerife, 1979.
a certain depletion of what might be called the purest art informel and to the shared expression of a
more and more widespread awareness of the stagnation and petrification not only of the political
regime, but of the habits, customs and self-image shaped in the course of those black years by the
society that sustained or resisted it.
These are dates when a younger generation began to establish a discourse and practice that
intrinsically and permanently rejected the aesthetic code and theoretical and practical models that
prevailed in preceding generations. The changes in paradigm, the variations in which international artists
were regarded to be influential, the very interpretation of artists’ role and the events that should interest
them, prompted this generation’s divorce from its immediate and triumphant predecessor. The distance
that imposed, not lacking in hostility, was established with respect to Manrique, among others.
*
By way of recapitulation of the foregoing and a review of César Manrique’s pictorial work from
today’s perspective, the first observation I would make, in apparent contradiction to what has been
sustained by most analysts, is that it can be readily separated from the artist’s other activities - sculpture,
architecture, design - and can also be singularly framed within the whole of the production and oeuvre
with which it concurs chronologically.
It is true that as a painter, Manrique did not cover very extensive ground. His hesitant,
academically realistic beginnings were followed by decorative figuration and that, in turn, by his equally
ornamental conversion to neofiguration with the incorporation of constructivist traits, under the
influence, referred above, of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky or Klee; his most signal achievements during
that decade were his mural paintings. His most intense and longest period focused on abstraction,
which he explored exclusively from the material standpoint and, even then, limiting the materials used.
In the late seventies Fernando Castro elaborated on this opinion. “I deduce that all of César’s painting,
from the fifties to date, is no more than an intelligent reiteration of certain leit motifs, a condensation
of experience on the bidimensional surface of the painting” 50 .
Finally - because his latest work features, in my opinion, the phantasmal apparition of fleshy figures
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