Manuel Salinas, the abstract painter born from the Baroque

Because Manuel Salinas, (Seville, 1940-2021)was a solitary, affable, self-taught painter, with that aristocratic veneer that comes from having been born and raised in the Casa Salinas, where his family treasures within the walls a historical legacy that worried Manuel so much.

The Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art presents the exhibition from May 9 to September 22 ‘Manuel Salinas. Strict abstract’a title that faithfully reflects what this artist’s painting was like, which in the words of the curator of the exhibition, Pepe Yñiguez, «It was described like this, strict abstract, and this term is also an ideology, there are abstractions that come out of nature, such as its etymology, to take outside. Salinas has no reference to the real world, nothing figurative, he starts from scratch with the painting itself, from the line of form, color, space, for him it was a challenge to paint from scratch.

Manuel Salinas died of Covid in 2021, in the midst of a time of creative intensity. This anthological exhibitioncontinues the CAAC’s line of work to disseminate established Andalusian artists, through which retrospectives of artists such as Gerardo Delgado, Pepe Soto, Carmen Laffón, Luis Gordillo, Guillermo Pérez Villalta or Alfonso Albacete, among others, affirming its commitment to contemporary Andalusian creation and its artists. The presentation was attended by the Secretary General of Culture, José Vélez, the director of the CAAC, Jimena Blázquez, and the curator of the exhibition Pepe Yñiguez.

The exhibition presents 85 pieces, between oil paintings on canvas, paper or board, paintings, watercolor charcoals, some drawings on paper and engravings, and extends from his first works, where the artist was barely 22 years old and exhibited at the Club La Rábida, to his latest works where Salinas has appropriated the best of the language of abstract expressionism, unifying in his work “the vibration and tension of Rothko’s color spaces and the immediacy and expressive urgency of Pollock to create a personal synthesis that reconciles both aspects,” he points out. Yñiguez.

It is an exhibition that the curator describes as “expected and necessary and which I have turned into a tribute after his death. In the selection of works, I have privileged the paintings of Manuel Salinas that were his property and for whatever reason, I wanted to have them, as well as those of his close family and close friends, such as Atín Aya, who had many pieces. In addition, there are many works from private collections in Madrid, Seville, Badajoz, Barcelona, ​​Lisbon…, Manuel Salinas has sold a lot of works in the last twenty-five years.

Visiting this exhibition, according to Yñiguez, is being able to get to know the painter’s work well. «Salinas has a place of honor in the history of Sevillian painting, and at the same time he is also a bit marginal, because he was self-taught and very solitary. When he began abstraction in the 70s, he did not link himself to the Sevillian painters, but to the Madrid group from the Buades gallery, which worked from more minimalist and much more reductionist perspectives, with minimal elements, which had nothing to do with the work of Gerardo Delgado for example, although later in the 70s there are some paintings that could be coincident.

Manuel Salinas also had an intense relationship with art and the city in a particular way. He had a fundamental role in the creation of the M11 Center led by Quico Rivas and Juan Manuel Bonet, with the support of Javier Guardiola. «His studio was like the embassy of many artists. Bell, For example, he painted a summer at home. Salinas also led to the arrival of Julian Schnabel to Seville to hold the exhibition at the Carmen barracks. The studio’s house was an embassy of painters,” says Yñiguez.

But Manuel Salinas’ ideology had many ‘springs’. With deep Sevillian roots, “he mixes the Sevillian baroque tradition, light, shadows, empty plenitude, exaltation of life through death, Holy Week…, and all of this in parallel to the international avant-garde that he knew from a very early age.” young thanks to his trips to Paris and his Catalan familyand especially to his uncle the designer Miguel Milá, an icon of Spanish design. He spent his summers in Cadaqués, where many artists gathered and where he spent his summers. Marcel Duchamp. “Sevillian art and the avant-garde are two sources from which Salinas draws.”

At the end of the 70s Salinas found the language of abstract expressionism appearing in his works. “the speed and freedom of the pictorial gesture.” To this conception of painting limited to basic elements such as line and color but used with as much expressiveness as emotionality, Manuel Salinas will add something of his own, something related to his innate taste for harmony and order: a kind of nostalgia for the geometry that can be traced even in his most gestural paintings,” says Yñiguez. In this stage that began in the 80s and will last his entire life. «It is not that he organized his paintings from geometric approaches, as he could have done in the 70s with minimalism, but it is the same process of painting that leads him to find, rather than search for, geometric reasons and relationships that balance the composition. . The value of the painting resulting from the process will reveal that tension between the expressive gesture and the idea of ​​order, between sensitive emotion and reason.

Towards the end of the 80s, Salinas’s painting created his own and personal synthesis of abstract expressionism in which vibration, tension, immediacy and expressivity are combined, also linked to the possible influences of painters such as José Guerrero or Miguel Ángel Campano, as well as his own sensitivity educated in the baroque.

In 2004 Manuel Salinas created the logo for the 75th anniversary of the birth of the ABC newspaper in Seville. The painting represented the number 75 in various chromatic proposals, and under the number appear the letters ‘ABC’ made from palettes of paint, a formula so characteristic of this painter.