MANUEL SALINAS
Strictly Abstract

Dates: May 9- September 22, 2024
Space: Claustrón Sur
Curator: Pepe Yñiguez

After years of self-taught training in which he painted portraits, exhibited at Club La Rábida in 1962, and of some shadowy, baroque wooded landscapes, showed at the legendary Sevillian gallery La Pasarela in 1965, Manuel Salinas (Seville, 1940-2021) moved towards abstraction in the 1970s thanks to his stays in Paris, where he had a studio, and in Catalonia, from where his maternal family hails, allowing him to come into contact with international avant-garde movements. In the mid-70s, back in Seville, he practiced a minimalist abstraction, closer to what was being done in Madrid around the Buades gallery, than to the other Sevillian abstract artists. Nevertheless, during this time, he did not disconnect from his city and promoted an experiment of great significance, the M-11 Art Center.

Juan Manuel Bonet, one of the members of the artistic team of M-11, will say of those 1970s that Salinas was the abstract painter who "got lost the most before finding himself," something that did not occur until the end of the decade,
when he encountered the language of abstract expressionism, where the speed and freedom of the pictorial gesture opened up the plastic space that isolated masses of colour occupied like a musical score.

From that moment on, once his field of action was defined, with the autonomous and self referential character of abstract language, it makes little sense to speak of periods or stages in his production. Salinas defined himself on every occasion he was asked to as a strict abstract artist, and in this happy formula, almost a game of philosophical language, his artistic ideology as well as his entire career are summed up.

Becoming an indisputable figure in Spanish abstraction of the late century, this persistence in Salinas of the same pictorial grammar does not question the time in which the works are made, but the possibilities of language.

Manuel Salinas is one of those painters who paint the same picture over and over again, always the same and always different, without a trace of monotony because each picture contains a new but very recognizable version of what he understands as the ideal image of painting. Only that this ideal image does not respond to the Platonic ideal, it does not actually exist previously, but is created little by little in each painting. All untitled paintings because they are all the same painting. Painting Painting is the ideal.

Collaborates: