VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

1. Georges Tiñes y Agnès Lempereur: Diccionario general de
ciencias humanas, Cátedra, Madrid, 1978, p. 718.
Preformational stages in
César Manrique’s latter production
Fernando Castro Borrego
In biology, the meaning of the term preformation is: “Theory according to which every germ cell
contains the organism of its kind fully formed and complete in all its parts and development of the
being is a direct result of what existed from the outset in the genome of the initial cell” 1 .
I sustain that all of César Manrique’s work responds to this idea of magmatic preformation; this
makes it difficult to classify his painting by chronological periods, in particular after the consolidation
of his material language in the sixties. For this reason, the present essay stresses the constants in his
production rather than the variables, the reason underlying his obsessions rather than the description
of any differences that may be detected in them.
In the beginning there was fire, the origin of all things. This definition, which could have been
extracted from a treatise on pre-Socratic physics, brings to mind the volcanologic trope, the wellknown
commonplace to which art reviews usually resort to interpret César Manrique’s pictorial work.
The fact that this figure of speech has prevailed over other critical interpretations of his oeuvre is not
coincidental, because it is based on the relationship between the material textures of his pictorial work
and the volcanic geology of his native island, Lanzarote. “All my painting,” the artist once said, “is,
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