Manuel Millares

(Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1926 – Madrid, 1972)

Cuadro (2)

1963

mixed media on burlap

167.3 x 135.4 cm

Inv. no. 34410

BBVA Collection Spain



Manuel Millares is one of the key figures of Spanish
. Born in a cultivated family, Millares’ initiation in painting took place at a very young age. His naturalist watercolour landscapes were soon replaced by works acknowledging the influence of the surrealism of Dalí, Paul Klee (1879-1940), Joan Miró (1893-1983), of the constructivist language of Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) and of pre-Hispanic art from the Canaries. After this early period, he started out on a phase of experimentation with burlap which would end up as his signature material.

For Millares, this period marked the maturity of his painting: when he worked with material within the spirit of
and reflects on the Spanish tradition of blackness that he shared with other members of the
he helped to found. Burlap gradually took over the space of his works to the point of becoming the support itself. The textures arise from the actual material, from its creases, stitching and tears, so as to turn the seams or perforations on the surface of the picture into the painterly gesture, as readily evinced in this work, an excellent example of his matter-based production from the early-sixties, largely indebted to the expressive modelling of the material itself. This working method gives the piece a three-dimensional quality that brings it closer to sculpture.

In this work the palette is reduced to white, black and the inclusion of red, hiding the natural colour of the support that had featured in previous works. There is also less tearing and greater contention. On the black surface —a tone that Informalismo identified with the disenchantment caused by the political situation of the time— we see the emergence of the sgraffito, that “x” so present in the work of Millares that breaks the chromatic density of the background, casting a point of light into the darkness.