Art Madrid'23 – `El Paso´ in Madrid and Barcelona: Canogar & Millares

 

 

 

Rafael Canogar exhibition in Madrid and Manolo Millares exhibition in Barcelona

 

 

Rafael Canogar was born in Toledo in 1935 and he approached painting when he was 14, with the support of the master Vázquez Díaz. He travelled to Paris and met the Informalism, a current that he wanted to developed because of the freedom it enabled. Years after, he got close to Luis Feito and Manolo Millares, among others, and set on El Paso group. Canogar pursues the greatest expressiveness with the minimum elements, giving them dynamism and power. Manolo Millares (Gran Canaria, 1926- Madrid, 1972) started to paint through self-study being inspired by surrealism and indigenous cultures from the Island. Later, he began to use burlap surfaces that he cut, broke and drilled. The same as Canogar does, he enhanced the matter as an expressive vehicle, using in his palette brown, black, red and white. 

 

 

Manolo Millares by Juan Dolcet, 1971

 

 

Manel Mayoral Gallery in Barcelona will host until the 25th of July the exhibition ´Millares: building bridges, not walls´, that put on eye on the canarian artist´s artwork and is curated by the theoric Alfonso de la Torre and the art historian Elena Sorokina. It shows MIllares´ most famous pieces, such as `Painting 32´ (1957-58), some of his anthropomorphic `homúnculos´, and two marvellous triptychs, one of them: ´Divertimentos para un políptico (1963)´, that is part of the permanent collection of the Antonio Pérez de Cuenca´s Foundation. It was in 1976 when  the last retrospective from this artist was made. As Alfonso de la Torre says:  “this exhibition presents Millares´obsessions”.

 

 

Rafael Canogar in his studio

 

 

Madrid highlights the figure of Rafael Canogar, an artist from Toledo. CEART (Tomás y Valiente Art Centre) in Fuenlabrada hosts the exhibition `Yesterday, today: Rafael Canogar´, that opens to the public until the 22nd of July. It is a retrospective of 60 paintings that proposes a tour through the artist's passionate life and artwork. This exhibition is organised in sections that comprise from the beginning of El Paso group to his most recent works, big pieces of saturated lights and drawn colours.

 

 

 

Homúnculo. Manolo Millares

 

These exhibitions provide the keys for understanding the avant-garde movement El paso. Luis Feito, Juana Francés, Manuel Rivera, Antonio Suárez, Antonio Saura y Pablo Serrano were some other participants of this collective. Thanks to Millares and Canogar we can experiment an approach to postwar painting in Spain and its revolutionary plastic features.

 

 

 Rafael Canogar. Atrio, óleo sobre lienzo, 2017

 

In the year 2020 in the heart of Barcelona a wandering gallery was born, the same one that in February 2021 would debut at Art Madrid with an exhibition proposal focused on contemporary portraits; with this subject matter it would manage to create a powerful dialogue between artwork and audience and make the seal Inéditad remain in the history of the event that contained it.

Jean Carlos Puerto. Protección. Oil and copper leaf on wood. 60 x 48. 2021. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Since that first time and until today, the wandering gallery has managed to build projects on otherness, has repositioned in the spotlight the discourses on the LGTBIQ+ collective, has consolidated a group of artists who share its principles of resilience and empathy and the best thing is that it continues to bet from the professionalism and commitment to give voice to the difference.

Claudio Petit-Laurent.. El Joven de la Perla. Oil on wood. 30 x 30 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Inéditad Gallery, thanks to its founder Luis López, its collaborators and the infinite possibilities manifested in the works of the artists it represents, is a gallery that has demonstrated its capacity and courage to stimulate the sensibility of the public through art and seduce a generation that moves between the glass window and the analogical story. Inéditad is a nomadic gallery that has gathered around it a community of artists and has moved the context with exhibition projects that think about LGTBIQ+ art without prejudices.

Pepa Salas Vilar. Las marcas del arcoiris. Oil on canvas. 40 x 50 cm. 2022. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Pride and Prejudice was inaugurated. An exhibition that brings together the works of sixteen artists: Abel Carrillo, Alex Domènech, Carlos Enfedaque, Silvia Flechoso, Jamalajama, Daniel Jaén, Claudio Petit-Laurent, Jean Carlos Puerto, Fernando Romero, Pablo Rodríguez, Pepa Salas Vilar, Jack Smith, Pablo Sola, Bran Sólo, Elia Tomás and Utürüo. Painting, illustration, photography and digital art are the manifestations that bring into dialogue around fifty neatly threaded pieces, in a discursive line that discusses such a latent phenomenon as discrimination. To achieve this, the artists invited to the exhibition question themselves whether: Does discrimination exist within the LGTBIQ+ collective?

Pride and Prejudice Official Poster. Image courtesy of the gallery.

With approaches on and from the body, the proposal invites to celebrate diversity, proposes to question and self-question the prejudices and attitudes of society against the collective. Pride and Prejudice is a space for dialogue about the constructs imposed on us by society. It is also an oasis in which to deconstruct with tolerance and respect the subjectivities that sometimes prevent us from approaching the production of the participating artists, simply because "the beautiful" does not fit in an androgynous body. The subjugation of stereotypes are pressed with determination to find the beauty of diversity in other palpable facets of reality.

Pablo Sola. All men are dogs. Photography. 2014. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Throughout these three years Inéditad has stimulated the vindictive projection towards bad practices, has questioned estates around the LGTBIQ+ body and the most admirable thing, is that these capacities have resurfaced around the dialogue and the visual narrative of the stories that are told from the visual: Artworks that are people, art that is, per se, humanity. Overcome impositions and accept what is different in order to continue fighting against homophobia, biphobia, lesbophobia or transphobia and defend the equal rights that all the acronyms of the collective deserve in our community.

That's Pride and Prejudice: One creature, the happiest in the world. And maybe other projects and other people have said it - or felt it - before, but none so fairly.

Silvia Flechoso. Hola, soy maricón. Oil on canvas. 73 x 54 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

From June 8th until June 22nd you can visit Pride and Prejudice. Carrer de Palau núm. 4. Canal Gallery space. Barcelona.