Manuel Viola (1916-1987)
Zaragoza
Zaragoza
“I’m a failure as a poet. This business of becoming a painter was an accident.”
Painter, poet, adventurer . . . Manuel Viola, always true to himself, constantly reinventing himself in a continuous coming and going from Zaragoza to Lleida, from Lleida to Barcelona, and from there to Paris, and then on to Normandy, and all over the world, exhibition after exhibition.
His canvases are explosions of light and color that bring to mind stellar explosions in outer space. His creative strength is expressed in the aggressiveness of his brushstroke, which twists and turns at a dizzying speed and is finally channeled into stylized paths of escape. It is a constant struggle between light and shadow with the canvas as its setting.
Viola’s artistic vocation arose early, around 1933, and he experienced it intensely in the magazine “Art”, that he founded together with Leandro Cristòfol and Gràcia Llimona. In it they published poems and wrote texts about music and the plastic arts. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil led him to enlist in the Republican army, and later to Paris, among so many other defeated exiles. There he met Pablo Picasso and Benjamin Péret, the greatest surrealist poet, and he also wrote articles in ‘La main à la pluma,’ (With Pen in Hand), the magazine edited by Paul Éluard.
His career as a painter began in Normandy, in 1941, and upon his return to Paris he widened his circle of friends with personages of the stature of Francis Picabia, Pierre Soulages, Camille Bryen or Hans Hartung. In 1949 he decided to return to Spain, where a few years later he joined the “El Paso” (The Step) Group, along with Antonio Saura, Martín Chirino, Luís Feito and Manolo Millares, among other artists. It was then that he began to produce his exceptional expressionist works, claiming Goya’s Black Period paintings as his source of inspiration.
In 1972 his first retrospective exhibition was held in Zaragoza, and two years after his death, in 1989, the city where he was born repeated the experience with another exceptional retrospective in posthumous homage to him.
Manuel Viola’s plastic work affects us profoundly due to its violent gestural language, and the powerful energy of his paintings forms part of the best collections in the world. Aldo Pellegrini once said of Viola’s paintings that “they offer the ideal space for examining freedom.”
Painter, poet, adventurer . . . Manuel Viola, always true to himself, constantly reinventing himself in a continuous coming and going from Zaragoza to Lleida, from Lleida to Barcelona, and from there to Paris, and then on to Normandy, and all over the world, exhibition after exhibition.
His canvases are explosions of light and color that bring to mind stellar explosions in outer space. His creative strength is expressed in the aggressiveness of his brushstroke, which twists and turns at a dizzying speed and is finally channeled into stylized paths of escape. It is a constant struggle between light and shadow with the canvas as its setting.
Viola’s artistic vocation arose early, around 1933, and he experienced it intensely in the magazine “Art”, that he founded together with Leandro Cristòfol and Gràcia Llimona. In it they published poems and wrote texts about music and the plastic arts. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil led him to enlist in the Republican army, and later to Paris, among so many other defeated exiles. There he met Pablo Picasso and Benjamin Péret, the greatest surrealist poet, and he also wrote articles in ‘La main à la pluma,’ (With Pen in Hand), the magazine edited by Paul Éluard.
His career as a painter began in Normandy, in 1941, and upon his return to Paris he widened his circle of friends with personages of the stature of Francis Picabia, Pierre Soulages, Camille Bryen or Hans Hartung. In 1949 he decided to return to Spain, where a few years later he joined the “El Paso” (The Step) Group, along with Antonio Saura, Martín Chirino, Luís Feito and Manolo Millares, among other artists. It was then that he began to produce his exceptional expressionist works, claiming Goya’s Black Period paintings as his source of inspiration.
In 1972 his first retrospective exhibition was held in Zaragoza, and two years after his death, in 1989, the city where he was born repeated the experience with another exceptional retrospective in posthumous homage to him.
Manuel Viola’s plastic work affects us profoundly due to its violent gestural language, and the powerful energy of his paintings forms part of the best collections in the world. Aldo Pellegrini once said of Viola’s paintings that “they offer the ideal space for examining freedom.”