Manolo Millares
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Manolo Millares (b. 1926, Las Palmas, Canary Islands) Self-taught as an artist, Millares was introduced to Surrealism in 1948. In 1953, he moved to Madrid and became an abstract painter. In 1957, Millares along with Antonio Saura founded the avant-garde group El Paso (The Step) in Madrid. He attained an international reputation by the early 1960s, and had a solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1961.
In Madrid, Millares was associated with ‘The Informalists’, a group of artists including Antoni Tàpies, Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura, Aníbal Villacís among many others who insisted that art should be removed from theory and concept. To these artists, the gesture used to make a painting was all-important. In the 1950’s, Millares began to make dramatic collages from found materials especially burlap. The fabric is stitched, bunched and bundled so that a shallow relief is formed and then paint (typically black or red) is applied in a gestural manner.
The work of Millares uncovers, layer by layer, a chilling archaeological excavation of human suffering and absurdity. From his childhood in the Canary Isles to his departure in 1955 for Madrid, where he settled definitively, this painter of truths investigated and dissected humankind in search of an answer that would relieve his existential anguish. This sense of tragedy, veiled in his early period by a magical surrealism charged with prehistoric symbolism, burst out in the late 50s in his dark works on torn sackcloth. Reflecting the prototypical España negra, the ripped and re-sewn sackcloths speak of a need often referred to by the artist to destroy so that, through "a radiant wound of health," something better may be built. They are manifestations, in his words, "of an art of explosion and protest, of a passionate means of expression that destroys itself so as to rebuild itself ipso facto from its ruins."
The Homunculi, the ragged and bloody monsters that appeared in 1960, seemed not to relieve the pain of this search. With the meticulousness of a scientist who knows he is close to solving a problem, Millares painted in an increasingly intense and dramatic manner. It was at this time, especially in the early 70s, that his paintings began to be taken over by white. A terrible white that remained with him, like an unanswered question, until the end of his days.
