These days a heart that has been burning for 40 years is beating again in ARCOmadrid.
It is shared by two men immersed in a strange dream.
One peeks out from inside the other.
They are the artist, dressed, hugging his muse, naked.
The sculpture is called
Manuel
and is signed by Rodrigo, simply.
The piece, a monument to unrequited homosexual love, was the most popular of the second edition of this same Madrid fair, held in 1983. From this Wednesday until March 10, it returns to Ifema rescued by José de la Mano.
Faithful to its line of research and historical recovery, this Madrid gallery dedicates a part of its
stand
to the pioneers of
queer
art in Spain during the Transition.
A claim where better-known names such as Costus or Juan Hidalgo coexist with others who have remained in the background such as Carlos Forns Bada, Claudio Goulart, Roberto González Fernández, Julujama or the one in question, Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester.
Known artistically as Rodrigo, his platonic love with Manuel was also manifested in one of the most influential comics of the Movida, published in four-page monthly installments in the first 12 issues of the magazine
La Luna de Madrid,
between 1983 and 1985. .
The former gallery owner, researcher and writer Joaquín García, who has served as curator of this
queer
selection for José de la Mano, puts the value of this work by Rodrigo into perspective.
“In the academic casts that are made to narrate or summarize the Movida by names and disciplines, trying to establish an assimilable canon, Rodrigo is to comics what Sybilla is to fashion, Pérez Villalta to painting or Almodóvar to cinema.”
Recently republished in a careful book with abundant archival material by the Cielo Eléctrico publishing house, this silent comic tells in detail what the sculpture screams.
In the words of the commissioner: “The most beautiful unconsummated love story in the world.”
Rodrigo's since he emerged one day in the summer of 1977 from the El Lago municipal swimming pool in Madrid, to fall in love at first sight with a marvel of masculinity, Manuel, an unbreakable heterosexual.
Page from the silent comic 'Manuel', by Rodrigo, recently recovered along with other unpublished materials by the artist and cartoonist by the Cielo Eléctrico publishing house.
Where Rodrigo was looking for a sexual-affective relationship, Manuel tested his limits in what we know today as homosociality (or friendship relationship between two men).
They went out together for walks, to dance, to the movies.
On his side, Rodrigo let off steam by going
cruising
, to the sauna or to dark rooms.
It's all in his vignettes.
On the way to Ifema to calibrate the lights that illuminate his sculpture these days, Rodrigo answers us on the phone: “I was very hung up on Manuel.
I was 27 years old and he was 24. He was what we understand by a normal man, although I hate the term, a simple guy.
When he left, I had lived a year of love and he had let himself be loved.
I sent him some drawings, which would be the embryo of the comic years later.
But first came the sculpture.
I started it the same day I returned from visiting him in his town and I left him there with his girlfriend, fully aware that we would probably never speak or see each other again.”
Before the explosion of the Movida, Rodrigo was torn between Architecture and Fine Arts, careers that he had studied almost to the end.
His virtuous hand drew up plans for Javier Carvajal's studio and supplemented his salary by making illustrations from photographic portraits.
He couldn't get Manuel out of his head.
The image of his own body emerging from his beloved appeared to him in a dream.
He began the sculpture without having any idea about modeling, from some photos that he had managed to take of him naked.
He was testing materials: wood, metal mesh, plaster, plaster... and an electrical circuit with a quartz lamp as a luminous heart.
He put it together over the years in the basement where he lived on Madera Street, in a prolonged act of love.
The sculpture 'Manuel', by Rodrigo, is part of the 'queer' art proposal of the Transition by the José de la Mano gallery for its 'stand' at ARCOmadrid 2024.Cano Estudio
Her friend, the painter Miguel Peña, took the gallery owner Fefa Seiquer to see her one day.
There was a week left until the second edition of ARCO.
He put her presiding over his
stand
.
Such an openly homoerotic work was quite a rarity at the time.
It became the attraction of the fair, as Rodrigo remembers.
“That seemed like a pilgrimage, people come and pass by.
On the five days of the event, punctually around three in the afternoon, an older lady painted like a parrot came, with her folding chair, and she sat for a while in front of the sculpture.
And I heard her say things like: 'Oh, if Federico saw this.'
And she was thinking 'who is this wonderful nutcase?'
Until she told me, my gallery owner: 'Don't you know who she is?
This is Maruja Mallo.
And Federico is Federico García Lorca! ”She laughs.
Manuel
generated shock, curiosity, strangeness.
Legend says that it was also controversial, that there were people who wanted to withdraw it.
It wasn't that bad, as its author remembers with a laugh.
“It particularly tormented Juana de Aizpuru [founder of ARCO, who will be missed this year because she has just retired].
She called him 'the man'.
She told my gallery owner: 'Take away the man, Fefa.
It's just that he keeps me awake, the image of him doesn't let me sleep at night.'
She, she was always so advanced... Perhaps it seemed to her something on the fringes of the artistic
intelligentsia
, too popular."
He cost 1,800,000 pesetas (about 29,000 euros today, if we take inflation into account).
She was almost sold a couple of times during the fair: to designer Juanjo Rocafort and to couturier Marujita Díaz.
The cast figures of Manuel and Rodrigo continued their dream in the gallery owner's warehouse for three years.
Until one of its regular buyers, a somewhat older American, an advisor to the Tate Gallery, took it first to London and then to New York, where he would die of AIDS six years later.
Nobody today is able to put a name to it.
Rodrigo calls him Irwin.
She does remember that of his boyfriend, Miguel, a handsome Argentinian similar to his Manuel.
Photo taken by Rodrigo himself of the passage of his sculpture 'Manuel' through ARCO in the second edition of the fair, in 1983.
And this is when researcher Joaquín García highlights its symbolic condition: “For me, the
Manuel sculpture is the first great
queer
work
, in all the senses of the word
queer
, in Spanish art.
Not only because of what it means to show the love story of two men, we cannot reduce
queerness
only to homosexuality;
but also for that
queer
aesthetic in the sense of strange, because it is
cronenbergiana
:
these gentlemen coming out of each other's bodies with a light bulb as a shared heart has a lot of the new flesh that David Cronenberg was also exploring around the same time.
All the meanings of the term
queer
are in
Manuel.
As is also the moment in which he comes into contact with the tragedy of AIDS.
The sculpture itself experiences the adventures of the homosexual throughout those years: from the sexual frustration of a love that is almost like a closet story to the virus, because the collector who acquires it dies of that.”
With his virtuosity and a particular fusion of the real and the dreamlike, 'Manuel', by Rodrigo, has transcended as one of the most influential comics of the Movida.
After the death of the buyer, the figure's heir boyfriend wanted to return it to its rightful owner.
The poetic dimension of
Manuel
's journey is amplified according to the story of his creator.
“Miguel sent it to me at reverse costs to Madrid, with wonderful packaging, American style, and at the airport they told me that getting it back would cost me 600,000 pesetas.
To me, who paid 20,000 pesetas in monthly rent.
So I decided to go to the airport just to pay the storage interest, so they wouldn't get rid of it.
Until one day I spoke to the warehouse manager, I told him everything openly.
He hugged me and told me: take her to him immediately.
Imagine, I started crying like a cupcake.”
Since then, wherever she has moved, Manuel's figure has slept at the foot of his bed, away from the eyes of the world.
Today Rodrigo is 74 years old;
Manuel, 71. Rodrigo has a daughter, survives without stopping drawing and lives in a town in the Sierra Norte of Madrid.
Manuel has grandchildren, he was widowed a month ago after spending his life with his longtime girlfriend and lives in his town of Granada.
They met again by chance over the years, but they hardly maintain a relationship, they talk very occasionally.
The last time Rodrigo was at ARCO as an artist was in 1998. His most memorable work returns to the market for 80,000 euros.
Now, he says, he is ready to say goodbye to his
Manuel,
to whom he says good night every day when the cats have already snuggled up to sleep and he has spent his time reading.
I hug her, wherever she goes, it will remain forever.
For commissioner Joaquín García, 'Manuel' is “the most beautiful unconsummated love story in the world.”