He Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art (CAAC) pay off your debt with Manuel Salinas (1940-2021) three years after his death with a retrospective that reviews his evolution from his beginnings at the Club La Rábida and the La Pasarela gallery to his consecration as the teacher who investigated the expressiveness of color from a very personal universe. The exhibition, which can be seen at the Monasterio de la Cartuja until September 22, approaches this self-taught creator, a “lone wolf of painting”, as the curator describes him. Pepe Yñiguez, which remained faithful to abstraction. The title of the quote strict abstracthighlights Salinas’ loyalty to the same imaginary.
The selection, of about 90 pieces, includes, in addition to some loans from private collections, the most precious works by the artist, the collections that he kept and that made up the painter’s sentimental heritage. “Of all the possible exhibitions,” Pepe Yñiguez explained to the press this Wednesday at the opening of the exhibition, “I preferred to do one that could be classified as the Salinas of Manuel Salinasthat is, privileging those works that he did not part with and those that remained among his family or close friends,” points out the curator, who has thus given priority to the most personal aspect of the Andalusian, which, however, “over everything in the last 20 years”, has been a signature highly valued “among collectors, fans and art lovers.”
strict abstract, whose inauguration was attended by the director of the Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art, Jimena Blazquez, and the Secretary General for Culture, Jose Velezprolongs the CAAC’s vindication of the great figures of the autonomous community, after the retrospectives dedicated to Gerardo Delgado, Carmen Laffón, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Alfonso Albacete or Luis Gordillo. Yñiguez points out that strict abstract “It should have happened a few years before, when they started talking about organizing it and when Manuel was alive. Unfortunately it has not been possible until today. The damn Covid took him away at the beginning of 2021,” laments the specialist.
Although the itinerary includes creations from his younger years, in which Salinas was still searching for his signature – a portrait of his father or a shadowed garden show this stage -, strict abstract demonstrates the author’s commitment to a language in which, Like a composer, he always pursued rhythm and proposed variations. Yñiguez remembers a phrase that the Sevillian, an elegant man not given to talking about himself, left for posterity, and in which he reveals his preference: “In that space of painting I found a more exciting challenge. In abstraction you start from scratch, you have to give expression to something that does not exist. You have to base yourself on your own culture, which is a great responsibility.” For the curator, the stubbornness with which Salinas embraced abstraction embodies a sentence of the symbolist Maurice Denis: “A painting, before being a horse, a naked woman or any anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.”
Friend of other creators like the photographer Atin Aya or the painter Miguel Angel Campano, Salinas defended his independence and learned the keys to his trade as an autodidact. But “nothing comes out of anything,” clarifies Yñiguez, who considers that “Salinas’s painting is born from his education and his aesthetic training.” Tradition and modernity intersect in the artistic personality of this author. The commissioner of strict abstract imagine the deep mark it would leave on the sensitivity of the young Salinas “the 16th century tilework, from which his family home is well nourished, with that regular plot that presages an infinite conception of space and, above all, the living heritage of the baroque, that conjunction of opposites, of lights and shadows, of fullness and emptiness, of voracious appetite for life and exaltation of death”, contrasts that reach, Yñiguez assures, “their maximum expression in Sevillian Holy Week” of which the painter was devoted.
But Salinas, who with the solidity of his work seemed impervious to the vagaries of art and the currents that followed one another, He knew the avant-garde well: He was one of those involved in the M11 Center that developed a bold program for the Seville of the 60s, he frequents the art scene of Paris in the 70s and soaks up other ways of understanding creation and life “in Catalonia, together with members from his maternal family [Salinas era hijo de María Asunción Milá, activista contra la pena de muerte que se carteaba con el papa Francisco]such as the famous designer Miguel Milá” and “artists and architects among whom was Marcel Duchamp“, with whom he rubs shoulders “in the summers of Cadaqués,” recalls Yñiguez. “His painting is born from that harmonious dance with tradition and modernity.”
The rooms of strict abstract They propose, with the help of Salinas, a song to tenacity, the story of a man who believed in the path he took with his brushes. “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 painting contains a new but very recognizable version of what is understood as the ideal image of painting,” reads the exhibition brochure. “Only that this ideal image does not respond to the Platonic ideology, it does not exist actually in advance, but is created little by little in each frame. Paintings all without titles because they are all the same painting.”
An always inspired flow, as the curator argues: “In the mid-90s, he significantly stopped dating his works and they are all parts of the same ideal, of an abstract classicism outside of changing fashions, in which the motifs are recurring without ever being exhausted. He is building a work that places Salinas without a doubt as an unavoidable reference for abstract painting in the last 50 years of Spanish art.”
In addition to the tribute that the CAAC owed to Salinas, strict abstract It is presented as an intimate celebration in which many of the works They leave the painter’s environment to dialogue with the public. The artist’s daughters, Inés and Myriam, admit how excited they are that their father’s work is recognized. In the Casa de Salinas, in Mateos Gago, Yñiguez has kept a large painting in a space in which photographs of Manuel Salinas in the studio that he had in this building, where the child began to dream, thanks to the fantasy of some tiles, the infinite possibilities of art.
