Manuel Saez

This is the second and most complete retrospective exhibition of this artist’s work to date, organized by William Jeffett (Curator of the Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida). The show contains over a hundred paintings by Manuel Sáez, made in the period that goes from 1984 to 2000, and also includes an important sample of his drawings and watercolours. The exhibition discloses the development of a sensual and playful figuration based on the American tradition of avant-garde representational painting, such as Pop Art or Abstract Expressionism. An illustrated catalogue has been published for the exhibition with reproductions of the works shown and texts by William Jeffett, Victoria Combalía Dexeus, Katya García-Antón, a poem by Kenny Scharf, a short story by Guillermo Pérez Villalta and an interview with the artist. Manuel Sáez (Castellón, 1961) is one of the most outstanding Spanish painters of his generation. The substantial nucleus of his work —painted in oil until 1989 and in acrylic since 1990— represents a subtle recreation of the plastic medium. Executed with perfect mastery of painting technique and also pencil drawing and watercolours, Sáez’s work puts the viewer in a position somewhere between the conceptual and the sensitive level. In a sense Sáez’s work can be considered to reside within the Spanish tradition of a sensual, erotic attitude towards the world of objects. As regards his qualities as a painter, he has many viewpoints in common with both figurative and abstract 20th century American art. In the words of the artist himself: “Although it may be a cliché, I see American artists like uncontaminated European artists. As Close said, they don’t take history into their studio with them. I am convinced that too much information can block you. Excess is equal to void. I don’t disdain history, but I have found less rhetorical and more intelligent solutions in American art.” Although they may not be obvious influences, the following are however significant reference points in Sáez’s work: Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Sol Lewitt, Frank Stella, Grant Wood, Leon Golub, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Kenny Scharf, Ralston Crawford, Phillip Guston, David Salle, Alex Katz, Cindy Sherman, Morris Lewis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Keith Haring, Eric Fischl and Andy Warhol. During the 80s, Sáez worked first in Barcelona and later in Madrid. At this time the artist experimented with a playful use of images, treating painting and its world of images as a telegraphic language partly made up of the language of comics and similar sources, meticulously painted and inserted into the fictitious surface of painting as a sort of challenge to the conventional significance of representation and the rhetoric of illusion. This phase of his work reveals his assimilation of the art of the first avant-garde movements of Duchamp, Picasso, Picabia, Warhol, and Dalí, and has certain links with Surrealism. These works can be seen as “plays on language”, showing a linguistic basis in the understanding of the images. In 1990 the artist got a scholarship and went to Rome, where he worked at the Spanish Academy. His experience in Rome brought about a shift in his “play theory” towards a no less humorous representation of the artist in a series of surprising self-portraits in which he cleverly undermines the seriousness of the artistic activity. Although Sáez prefers to use objects as the topic of his paintings, his approach to the representation of objects is packed with autobiographical content. In 1995 Sáez spent a few months in the Dominican Republic. During this stay he made drawings and watercolours of a new sort of object typical of the tropical landscape and in these works he adopted a new approach to the use of colour, as can be seen in his most recent acrylic paintings. The works by Sáez in the late 90s present everyday objects situated on a background of saturated colour. These objects, usually presented in pairs, are not conceived like still lifes but are based on hundreds of photographs of objects, landscapes and people taken by the artist. These reveal a pictorial reflection about photography as a medium. In spite of this photographic connection with the world of objects, Sáez’s representation of images is affected by the pictorial language of painting and more specifically by colour —the artist paints layer upon layer of colour— laid on in thin, transparent, diluted, broad brushstrokes. In this way the optical representation of the object is carried out as a pure, dematerialized field of colour akin to abstraction. Eroticism is a remarkable approach to painting, as sensuality subverts the apparent neutrality of the object. This can be clearly seen in the series of paintings titled Safe Sex (1997), which consist of pairs of identical objects, or in his extremely evocative series called Chupetes (1997-1998) and in the series of erotic pencil drawings of women in spontaneous and enigmatic postures. Sáez has participated in over fifty exhibitions both in Spain and abroad since 1981. He held many exhibitions at Galería Temple in Madrid and Galería René Metràs in Barcelona during the 80s. In 1990, he held a show at Gamarra y Garrigues in Madrid; in 1991 at Fundació la Caixa in Valencia, and in 1996 his first retrospective exhibition was set up at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid under the title Colección Exclusiva 1984-1995. In 1993 his works were included in the group exhibition titled Exquisite Corpse: The Rules of the Game at the Drawing Center in New York; in 1996 the CAAM (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) included him in the exhibition Corona Roja. Sobre el Volcán; and in 1998 he took part in Spain is Different: Post-Pop and the New Image in Spain at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (England). The present exhibition is an extended version of one that travelled between 1999 and 2000 to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo El País (Montevideo) and the Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico FD). Sáez’s work is to be found in many public collections in Spain, including the following: Fundación Argentaria (Madrid), Fundació La Caixa (Barcelona), the IVAM (Valencia) and Fundación Coca-Cola (Madrid). Manuel Sáez prepared a new series of forty watercolours for this exhibition at the IVAM Centre del Carme.