The new CAAC exhibition dedicated to Manuel Salinas

'Strict abstract', the new CAAC exhibition dedicated to Manuel Salinas

Curated by Pepe Yñiguez, the exhibition covers, through a selection of nearly 90 works, the career of the Andalusian painter
The Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC), dependent on the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sports, presents from May 9 to September 22, 2024 the exhibition on the artist Manuel Salinas Strict Abstract, an exhibition that brings together an anthological selection of his work curated by Pepe Yñiguez. This is a unique retrospective that delves into the most outstanding work of the Sevillian painter, from his beginnings to his last works, a year before his death, details the CAAC in a press release.

With this exhibition, which can be visited in the South Claustrón of the exhibition space, the CAAC continues the line of work of disseminating established Andalusian artists by holding retrospectives of the works of Gerardo Delgado, Carmen Laffón, Luis Gordillo, Guillermo Pérez Villalta or Alfonso Albacete, among others, affirming its commitment to contemporary Andalusian creation and its artists. The presentation was attended by the Secretary General for Culture, José Vélez, the director of the CAAC, Jimena Blázquez, and the curator of the exhibition Pepe Yñiguez.

Manuel Salinas Milá (Seville, 1940-2021) is one of the most important Spanish abstract painters of the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decades of the current one. The exhibition, which brings together nearly 90 works -among which are works on canvas, paper or board, paintings, watercolor charcoals, some drawings on paper and engravings-, covers a journey from his first works, where the artist had barely 22 years old and exhibits at the La Rábida Club his first portraits, the result of self-taught work, until his latest works where Salinas has appropriated the best of the language of abstract expressionism, unifying in his work “the vibration and tension of spaces of color of Rothko and the immediacy and expressive urgency of Pollock, to create a personal synthesis that reconciles both aspects,” says Yñiguez.

A self-taught artist
“Salinas will be defined on as many occasions as he was required to do so as strictly abstract,” words that Yñiguez collects to give the title to this exhibition and that summarize both “his artistic ideology and his career.” Salinas came to abstraction after self-taught portraits and a series of somber landscapes, and after coming into contact with the international avant-garde during his studies in Paris and his connection with his maternal family in Barcelona. In these years, in which he returned to Seville, his painting would be close to minimalism “exploring concepts such as space, limit, form and background (…) but with a continuous presence of the hand. An experimental stage where his painting quickly changes its appearance,” notes Yñiguez.

Three of the works included in the exhibition 'Manuel Salinas. Strict abstract' in the CAAC
Three of the works included in the exhibition 'Manuel Salinas. Strict abstract' at the CAAC / PEPE MORON

At the end of the 70s Salinas found the language of abstract expressionism, appearing in his works “the speed and freedom of the pictorial gesture” and opening the “plastic space that color would later occupy, converted into an autonomous form. To this conception of painting limited to basic elements such as line and color but used with as much expressiveness as emotionality, Manuel Salinas will add something of his own, something related to his innate taste for harmony and order: a kind of nostalgia for the geometry that can be traced even in his most gestural paintings,” details Yñiguez. In this stage that began in the eighties and will last his entire life, Salinas, the curator continues, “it is not that he organized his paintings from geometric approaches, as he could have done in the seventies with minimalism, but that he is the same process of painting that leads him to find, rather than search for, geometric reasons and relationships that balance the composition. The value of the painting resulting from the process will reveal that tension between the expressive gesture and the idea of order, between sensitive emotion and reason.”

From this moment on we cannot speak of stages or phases in his production, but rather of his own interest in the purely pictorial essence. A visual balance, very aesthetic, that made it very attractive to collectors. In his works, Manuel Salinas works over and over again on the same concept: “he paints the same painting (…) without a trace of monotony because each painting contains a new but very recognizable version of what [he] understands as the ideal image of the painting,” Yñiguez summarizes.

Some of the works in the exhibition 'Manuel Salinas. Strict abstract' / PEPE MORON

Towards the end of the eighties, Salinas's painting created his own and personal synthesis of abstract expressionism in which vibration, tension, immediacy and expressivity are combined, also linked to the possible influences of painters such as José Guerrero or Miguel Ángel Campano, as well as his own sensitivity educated in the baroque.
Coinciding with the exhibition at the CAAC, the Casa de Salinas (Mateos Gago, 39) collects photographs of the painter in the studio he had in his family home, a space with a long history but that preserves his palatial character. Manuel Salinas himself intervened decisively in the last substantial adaptation of the house in the 90s.

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