VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

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7. Carlos Edmundo de Ory: “El nivel estético de César Manrique”, text for César Manrique’s first solo exhibition at the Clan Gallery, Madrid, 1954, reproduced in the Retrospective Exhibition, Casa de Colón, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, February 1980. spreads over the canvas from the acrylic tube it is like solidifying lava. And although - as Goya said - time also paints, for César Manrique painting was a negation of time, which is another way of saying a conjuring of death. The ultimate and explicit goal of alchemy was to stop time. The idea of solidifying time in painting was even given a term, “lithochronism”, coined by the Canary Island surrealist painter Óscar Domínguez and his friend the Argentine novelist Ernesto Sábato. In a critical text on César Manrique’s work, the poet Edmundo de Ory broached the ontological status of what I have called the preformative states of his painting, referring to the “organic progeny of being and nature” 7 . This is tantamount to proclaiming the illusory nature of the evolution of living creatures: everything exists and is present in nature from the beginning. Therefore, if beings do not admit development (epigenesis), nothing is born, nothing dies. It is no coincidence that anything suggestive of construction (epigenesis) is flatly rejected in César Manrique’s work. And the mobiles? Well. First of all, they are toys of the wind, they interact with it. They are essentially related to place and the forces of nature. They are not reason’s artefacts, despite their geometric structure. We could even say that, given their radial and symmetrical configuration, these mobiles are steel cacti. Although they are machines composed of arms, bearings and so on, there is something in them that pertains to nature. The image gives no account of the construction of the object, because everything already existed in the original preformative state. The astral scheme that presides all his pictorial work explains the genetic meaning of the images. This strange inversion of the origin of all things was exemplified by César Manrique in the trees he planted at the Martiánez pools in Puerto de la Cruz (Tenerife), with their roots pointing upward. Although his pictorial images appear to respond to a powerful urge for material and sensual pleasure, they are but reflections of the astral order referred above: cosmic resonance in which sensitivity and love are requisite to visual perception. One needs to be alert to these echoes to perceive them as images and commit them to eternity. In his latter years, when his reputation as a landscape architect continued to grow, he never ceased to reaffirm his faith in painting: just as Leonardo sustained that, as the universal science it is, it could accommodate everything, César Manrique believed that because of its relationship to nature, painting should be attributed the task of reflecting universal truth. He regarded Leonardo’s marvellous 197
198 universality to be the ideal to which the true artist should aspire, despite the obstacles existing today to reach that goal. He thought that if decrepit industrial civilisation were to one day give rise to a new Renaissance, it would spring both from a renewed relationship with nature and the faith that society places in the freedom of creative individuals. Neither of these two conditions appeared to be in place at the end of the twentieth century. Nor was César Manrique deluded in this respect: “(...) The Renaissance was an example of diversity, symbolised in history by Leonardo da Vinci. Without freedom, wisdom and creativity cannot flourish” 8 . It was from this definition of the universality of painting that César Manrique regarded not only architecture but also his struggle in defence of endangered nature. Even when he was under greatest pressure to comply with his architectural commitments, he always turned to painting, which was his inexhaustible spring. “And then, in a very significant manner, there is my painting, the starting point of my true quest, to which I am intensely devoted day by day, making use of all the possible revelations which form, colour and texture may bring” 9 . Painting was, then, the core that nourished all his creative activity. He regarded painting to be a sort of research, a fact that confirms the idea that all his findings in other fields were no more than the development of forms that he had “experimented” with on canvas. Knowledge is not incompatible with pleasure, and just as painting was like a test bench for him, his studio was a laboratory. In the seventies he introduced what in my opinion is the most significant variation in his pictorial language: the presence of embryonic forms under the compact surface of the canvas. These images (e.g. Enterrados - Buried -, 1974, Castillo de San José) have been construed in palaeontological terms, i.e., as fossil vestiges from the remote past. Underneath this initial superficial description we might wonder why César Manrique took this turn in his painting, which until then had been rigorously abstract. Many Spanish painters who had been militant lyrical abstractionists began to include veiled figurative references in their works in the sixties (Millares, Saura, Canogar, etc.). César Manrique took a little longer, but he, too, followed this tendency. And yet there is a substantial difference between the iconographic allusions of the above artists and those that abound in César Manrique’s paintings after 1974: the former are always broken, misplaced human figures, whereas there is no human trait whatsoever in César Manrique’ painted works. There are primitive animals or embryonic forms from which human beings might or might not derive in the evolutionary chain. In the artists cited, the 8. Fernando Gómez Aguilera, op. cit., No. 74, pp. 82 and 83. 9. Ibídem, No. 82, p. 88.
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Page 3 and 4: 148 a point of no return in many ot
Page 5 and 6: 150 an important factor in triggeri
Page 7 and 8: 152 Tàpies, the member of the grou
Page 9 and 10: 154 Amo took his endeavour beyond w
Page 11 and 12: 156 and utopian abstraction of Equi
Page 13 and 14: 158 such as Valencia and Bilbao, av
Page 15 and 16: 160 movements such as so-called pos
Page 17 and 18: 162 substantial number of centres a
Page 19 and 20: 164 factors together and each one s
Page 21 and 22: 166 The presence of cacti as the mo
Page 23 and 24: 168 The universe illustrated in the
Page 25 and 26: 170 line of a virgin world, a world
Page 27 and 28: 172 immediate reference: the land.
Page 30 and 31: 1. “César Manrique”, Diario de
Page 32 and 33: 4. Eugenio Carmona, “Materias cre
Page 34 and 35: theoretical issues of abstract art.
Page 36 and 37: 12. Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño, op. ci
Page 38 and 39: 19. John Bernard Myers, “Un singu
Page 40 and 41: 25. Carlos Edmundo de Ory, “El ni
Page 42 and 43: 34. John Bernard Myers, op. cit. 35
Page 44 and 45: 39. Lázaro Santana, op. cit. 40. T
Page 46 and 47: 47. Lázaro Santana, Manrique, Edir
Page 48 and 49: 50. Fernando Castro, “Aproximaci
Page 50 and 51: 1. Georges Tiñes y Agnès Lempereu
Page 54 and 55: 10. Ibídem, No. 16, p. 46. He neve

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