Manolo Millares

Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Galerie Messine, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in the 1960s

Brought up in the Canary Islands as a child of the Spanish Civil War, Millares’ early life bore witness to the vicious reprisals meted out against his father, brother and many of his close family by Franco’s nationalists. Always a staunch defender of his own privacy, he retreated into himself and found voice for his emotions in his compositions.  Innovatively, Millares took sackcloth – the material in which rations were wrapped all over war-torn Europe – and placed it torn and blackened in the centre of his compositions - a powerful, authentic evocation of the fatal wounds that had befallen the continent.

Building on the Spanish tradition of España Negra, Millares, like Goya, is an artist of the tragic. Raw burlap, torn apart and mangled into new forms is covered in explosions of black and white paint - this is a strong, intense composition which achieves a powerful poetic and emotional resonance in the viewer. Motivated by a search for the ethical in art and reflecting the consequences of the Spanish civil war and the difficult post-war times, Millares’ work is an expressionist Cri de Coeur. Using the coarse material of sackcloth, his is a style of art that highlights poverty and poorness of spirit. His strict adherence to the use of powerful whites, blacks and reds creates a powerful sense of the dichotomies with which he concerned himself: between light and dark, life and death, blood and nothing.

By using such a humble material as burlap, Millares was seeking out a new, more earthy way to create art – an art disillusioned with and diametrically opposed to sumptuousness and idealisation. This commitment to a new artistic mentality found voice in 1957 – one year before the present work was painted – when he and Saura co-founded the “El Paso” group dedicated , as its manifesto said, to “creating a new state of the spirit within Spanish art” together with “the moral need to do something within their country” (cited in: Exh. Cat., Santiago de Compostela, Auditorio de Galicia, 1998, Manolo Millares, p. 147) Cuadro 42 is a striking early example of the success of this movement. With its tears and voids at the heart of the painting, its sheer rawness in colour and material, it is nothing less than pictorial poetry.