The mystery of Manolo Gil, the great promise of Spanish abstract art who died at the age of 32

Portrait of Manolo Gil. José de la Mano Gallery

“Now I need to paint and save myself, Jorge.

The theory has served me to create a state of anguish that I have to realize (...).

Theory is my vomit, for now.

Maybe with this, I'll be cured of something."

The Jorge to whom these words are addressed is Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003), the brilliant Basque sculptor who functioned as a bridge between the avant-garde of the 1920s and the post-war generations.

The man who wrote them, however, was much less well known: Manolo Gil (1925-1957), a young Valencian artist who, on that Christmas of 1956, when he wrote these words, was experiencing his own inner revolution.

A year earlier, after a meeting with Oteiza in Tarragona, he had begun a process of creative transformation that had led him to abandon figuration —until then he had enjoyed a certain prestige as a muralist— to embrace the abstraction advocated by the Basque artist.

In any case, the process did not come to an end.

Gil died in August 1957 after a devastating illness that cut short his life and his career.

Now, the Madrid gallery José de la Mano is rewriting this mournful page of contemporary Spanish art with

an exhibition (until October 16) that brings together for the first time the works that Gil carried out during those months of frenetic intellectual and pictorial activity, and which had remained forgotten until now.

“I didn't know much about Manolo Gil, except for the manifesto he had written together with Oteiza, and when I studied it I was struck by the fact that there was such a clear dialogue with the experimental purpose of Oteiza's work.

But nothing else.

Basically, I put his name on Google and nothing came up.

Until one day the directors of José de la Mano called me to tell me that they had found some

what they wanted me to see."

This is how curator Jon Echeverria Plazaola tells ICON Design about his first contact with these recovered works.

Expert in the work of Jorge Oteiza, he attended the call of the gallery team to find a set of pieces that showed that, in addition to letters and that manifesto written in tandem, Oteiza's influence on Gil was reflected in works that they are authentic rarities in the Spanish art of their time.

Composition with works belonging to the series "Study of forms" (1957) by Manolo Gil. José de la Mano Gallery

Arranged on the two walls that welcome the visitor to this gallery in Madrid, the

de Gil are small collages of geometric shapes on yellowish paper that, at the right distance, reveal their true origin: they are made on the back of much more prosaic sheets.

"It's a recipe book from a Valencian pharmacy, which leads us to think that the artist used it as a form of research," explains gallery owner José de la Mano, who together with the gallery's co-director, Alberto Manrique, has led carried out an almost detective investigation to demonstrate that, in fact, those surprising pieces signed in the lower right corner as "XIL" are works by Gil that remained dormant in archives and private collections throughout Spain, sometimes without their owners knowing their true nature. authorship

And what these works tell is the story of a friendship and, above all, of an enriching intellectual dialogue for both.

Oteiza and Gil met at the call to decorate the Labor University of Tarragona in 1955. At that time Gil had acquired a certain notoriety as a figurative painter, strongly influenced by the aesthetics of the Quattrocento and by the language of the avant-garde.

"The shift that Gil makes in his language reveals a very close dialogue with Oteiza," explains Echeverria.

"It filters all of Oteiza's research on abstraction and integrates it into his language and, above all, into his theoretical elaborations."

In fact, for posterity, the relationship between the two artists would be reflected in a theoretical text, a manifesto that they half-wrote and that, for Gil, would translate into these works.

“The works that this exhibition recovers have surprised me very pleasantly, because it was not known that both artists were so close, and the truth is that there is a very close relationship and, above all, in very important moments.

When Oteiza was investigating the nature of abstraction, it seems that Manolo was directly in his workshop.

Also, unlike other artists and characters in that orbit, who were very flattering, Manolo Gil knew what he wanted.

He had character.

In that sense, it's a fairly level relationship."

Of course, the asymmetry between the two is notorious.

If Gil was still searching for his own language, Oteiza was already an institution in Spanish art that in those years was struggling to carry out his Apostolate for the basilica of Arantzazu and was preparing his participation in the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1957,

"Booklet of regular figures (Decomposition of the square)" (1957) by Manolo Gil, a piece that reveals the influence of Oteiza. José de la Mano Gallery

The more than forty works by Gil that are now exhibited in Madrid, although they reveal the influence of Oteiza, also underline the personality of an artist with his own codes.

"Manolo Gil thinks like a painter and Oteiza thinks like a sculptor," says Echeverria, pointing to the influence of Malevich and other European schools of abstraction.

The materials used - pieces of colored paper glued precisely on the surface of the

— underline that, possibly, these works were studies for more ambitious pieces that Gil never did.

Perhaps this absence of more forceful works explains the silence around this stage of Gil's which, although less well known than his figurative creations, is more important than expected for Spanish art of the time.

"His career was cut short and totally forgotten by the general public, although his name is in all the books," explains de la Mano, who mentions the chapter dedicated to Oteiza in Oteiza

(Oteiza Museum, 2009), where some fragments of Valencian letters already appeared.

“The letters that we have recovered are very resounding, there is closeness, there is personal treatment and possibly Manolo was working in Oteiza's workshop here in Madrid”, he affirms.

That Gil has been until today a forgotten artist is a phenomenon that is explained by the currents that govern the art market and the constant rewriting of the canon.

Decades after the death of the Valencian, his heirs donated most of his work to the IVAM in Valencia, which dedicated a monographic exhibition to him in 1995. Thus, a large part of his creations were kept safe and secure even though, paradoxically, he was sentenced to a closed drawer of the history of recent art.

"Legacies and donations to institutions, as in this case to IVAM, have a positive side, which is that the work is preserved, but the fact that there are no works on the market means that the great public.

The IVAM has barely paid attention to him since 1995, and in the end the memory of him is being lost, ”explains José de la Mano.

The gallery owner opened his Madrid establishment in 2005 precisely with the intention of putting into circulation important but unknown artists, especially from the central decades of the 20th century, and also from the languages ​​linked to abstraction.

From this experience —which has produced such relevant results as the recovery of Aurélia Muñoz or Ibarrola's

comes a wide network of contacts, collectors and archives that have allowed him to recover the works in this exhibition, which were scattered and, in most of it unidentified in different national collections.

“We located a

and we have been pulling the thread”, explains de la Mano, who details the sources.

“We have located some works originally from the family workshop, and another batch of gifts to a critic from Zaragoza.

The private collection of the Pedralba 2000 Museum has also helped us a lot, which comes from the Val i 30 gallery, which always recognized Gil as an important artist and bought works from his widow”.

Portrait of Manolo Gil in 1956, at the time when he had already met Oteiza and taken a turn towards abstraction. José de la Mano Gallery

To finish closing the circle, the gallery owners have resorted to texts that underpin this relationship, as well as the attribution of the works: a series of letters that Gil wrote to Oteiza, and that are kept in the foundation that protects the legacy of the Basque sculptor , and also the newspaper of the Valencian, which is part of the exhibited materials, and which includes a draft of the manifest

or

that both published and that, as a result of this finding, Echeverria considers to have been written by Gil based on his conversations with his teacher.

The exhibition also includes photographs from the time that allow us to reconstruct the last months of Gil's life.

They are materials, after all, that serve to contextualize works full of experimental desire and modernity at a key moment.

In 1957, the year of Gil's death, Oteiza participated in the founding of Equipo 57, the group that articulated the heyday of geometric abstraction in Spain.

That is why the exhibition is the encapsulation of a moment and also the rehabilitation of a forgotten figure.

"I see it as the beginning of the rediscovery of Manolo Gil," says Echeverria.

“If this research had continued, we would have had one of the greats,” says de la Mano.

With this exhibition,

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