Manuel Salinas cannot be pigeonholed in any one movement or style. His practice evolved on the sidelines of prevailing trends, though his painting in the 1980s did dovetail in some aspects with . We can trace his brushwork back to the landscapes from his beginnings as a painter, but it was not until the mid-seventies when he would engage fully with vanguard art and create his first truly non-figurative works.

Salinas was one of the driving forces behind the creation of

 Centro de Arte M-11 

a cutting-edge art centre in Seville founded with the mission to turn the city into Spain’s third most important contemporary art centre.

in 1974. In 1980 he presented a series of works from this early abstract phase at the Galería Buades in Madrid, where one can observe a notable process of reduction and contention in his vernacular.

His work underwent a change with a series of pencil drawings in which he strove to free the gesture, which he then translated to large canvas paintings. This is the case of the two pictures at hand, the first the artist executed with gesturalism close to American expressionism. In 1982 his work was shown in Diez pintores sevillanos, together with Juan Suárez (1946) and Ignacio Tovar (1947), among others.

In this astutely structured work from 1982, the paint is applied very dynamically throughout the canvas, with a prevalence of warm tones that are confronted to create a symphony of colour. The paint is broken with free-flowing cold brushstrokes, standing out against the warmth of the background, instilling power and authority to a work of great quality and movement. Here the form is negligible, with the absolute focus given to colour and gesture.