Painting to Be Constructed in Your Head
La Bibi Gallery
Manu García
February - May 2024
La Bibi is pleased to inaugurate the exhibition "Painting to be constructed in your head" by Manu García (Oviedo, 1994). Based in Oviedo, in recent years the artist has developed a pictorial exploration based on the freedom of languages and a playful approach. His first solo exhibition in Spain brings together a series of works that have been produced during his stay at La Bibi residency, being influenced by the context of the island, the landscape around the studio, and, no less important, the weight of pictorial tradition. How is it possible to lighten this weight in the practice of painting to the point where it seems spontaneous, intuitive, and visceral?
The title of the exhibition provides us with some clues in this regard. In 1964, Yoko Ono published "Grapefruit," a book that containing aesthetic proposals from a playful, dematerialized and experimental approach. She included a series of instructions for paintings, such as "Painting to be constructed in your head," composed in the spring of 1962: observe three paintings carefully. Mix them well in your head. The instructions define well Manu García's work at this moment, both for his use of references from the Spanish pictorial tradition and for the theme of his most recent series – large heads containing a universe of diverse elements. Their black outlines serve as a container of ideas in which it is possible to find anything from a motorbike to the reference of a painting by Velázquez, as well as the blue palm tree that is present in each of the canvases and which is a visual synthesis of the Mallorcan landscape.
What seems to be essential in this work of mixing and constructing painting are the notions of process and play. The process ties Manu García's painting to the passage of time, as each painting takes days, sometimes weeks, to be completed. Thus, it becomes a kind of large-format diary page in which the artist records various mental images and everyday experiences. The fact that the pictorial process stretches over time allows for the accumulation of elements and layers that function as a set of strata on the canvas. Near a face, there is a sneaker, but also a plant leaf or a visual reference hanging on the studio wall. The result is a sort of de-hierarchization of the canvas, undoubtedly contributed by the fact of starting the paintings on the floor, inhabiting it, and moving around it: none of these experiential fragments is more important or meaningful than the previous one, nor will it be than the next. On the contrary, these fragments of lived reality meet each other in the pictorial space, interconnecting through the use of color and shape, floating and resting alongside each other as the painting process comes to an end.
On the other hand, play performs a fundamental role and ties his practice to space. Historian Johan Huizinga claimed that play is the experience that makes us human, the most defining trait of homo ludens. In this sense, Manu García experiments with the canvas space in a playful and intuitive way. As in any game, there are certain rules, but knowing them allows him to reinvent them, rearrange them, and consciously set them aside. The result must be a painting that, in his own words, "happens from the gut." In this intuitive connection between the gut and the head, experimentation and tradition, freedom, and rules, the new paintings that make up this exhibition are constructed.