`El Paso´ in Madrid and Barcelona: Canogar & Millares

`El Paso´ in Madrid and Barcelona: Canogar & Millares

Jun 27, 2017

exhibitions

 

 

 

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

 

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exhibitions

The CEART opens this Thursday, November 14th in the room A an exhibition dedicated to this master of photography, which will be open to the public until February 9th. The show includes one of the artist's latest projects, focused on the hard work carried out by the miners of Serra Pelada, an open gold mine in the heart of Brazil where employees daily risked their lives.

Immigration, poverty, marginal life, slave labour, man's relationship with the land, the use of natural resources... are issues that have always fascinated Salgado. From the beginning of his career as a photographer, his work has opted to give visibility to the most disadvantaged groups and to create with his images a vivid and impressive visual story without fakes. With a raw black and white, this author's work transits between photo-reportage and naturalistic photography.

And the idea that permeates all his work is human dignity. Salgado portrays employees, miners and gatherers from a purely humanistic approach that wants to value their integrity, their strength and their resilience.

“If you photograph a human, so that he is not represented in a noble way, there is no reason to take the picture. That is my way of seeing things.”

Salgado entered this discipline long after completing his studies in economics between Brazil and the United States, and a doctorate in statistics in France. But in 1973 his life took a turn, and he decided to start his career as a photographer. He achieved to work at the Gamma Agency and Magnum Photos for more than 15 years until in 1994 he founded his own agency “Amazonas Imagen”.

With the “Gold” project, the photographer portrays a harsh reality that takes place in the Serra Pelada mine, a name given to a totally devastated and anarchically excavated mining enclave, the world's largest open-pit gold mine, through which more than 50,000 people have passed. In the heat of the legends about the mysterious “El Dorado”, the enthusiasm for this precious metal led to the development of strenuous exploitation practices for the workers and to originate tales of grief and glory, of human victory and defeat between the soil, the tunnels and the cargo baskets.

The CEART exhibition brings together Salgado's full portfolio in his characteristical black and white and large-format photographs that leave no one indifferent.

 

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