"Paintings by Manuel Millares"
2003-12-11 until 2004-01-31
Seoul Arts Center
Seoul, , KR Korea (South)

Ranging from archaeological evocations of a provocative primitivism, in which loneliness and the power of weak half-seen human figures are enhanced against the grandiose backdrop of an unbounded material, to rending treatments of form in his mixed technique compositions on sackcloth, the Cork of the Canary artist Manuel Millares presents the successive perspectives of a spirit that is never satisfied with the predominant answers to the great questions of life and the reality of the age.

. Tormented in his investigations and serene in his manner of tackling the most disconcerting dimensions of time and space, the painter, whose career reaches back to the main Spanish art movements since the nineteen-fifties, has employed a series of resources and approaches that have enabled him to discover the creative origins of a new symbolism. Each of his motifs is impregnated with a tension that goes beyond mere abstraction, in order to investigate the inexhaustible possibilities of the material itself, featuring a combination of thrown-out objects that, in themselves, constitute a metaphor and a dramatic means of understanding the elusive and yet all-encompassing reality of our time. In this respect, Millares creates an non-transferable language, an aesthetic approach that, in its own radical chromatic contrasts –alternatively predominant whites and blacks serving as outbursts of lucidity in modern Man’s conscience- attains a new, more rewarding and tragic and tragic inner understanding of this reality.

This exhibition, that presents the most important work by this painter, offer us the opportunity to enter the disconcerting and vital world that Millares’ serene and open approach has been able to create in order to raise new questions and evoke a sense of uneasiness.

IMAGE
Manolo Millares,
Unititled, 1966.
Private collection.

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