Manuel Prior "Los borrachos - ("Tarde de sábado")" - The drunks ("Saturday afternoon") 1951
From cultura.castillalamancha.es/culturaenredclm/prior-corazon...
The exhibition “PRIOR 70 years of painting, revealing what reality hides” compiles paintings of all the themes and series that it has carried out, and where it proposes a journey into the heart of its creator that he has been able to capture pictorially. a very personal, unique and recognizable universe in a continuous investigation and renewal in the search to show his own creative vision, represented by his hands in a masterful way.
His technique and pictorial style, the wisdom of his hands and, above all, his gaze show us human landscapes, situations and life experiences, from a point of view not discovered by the majority.
His creations are poetic and musical compositions of the emotions and fundamental values of the human being, which he puts before our eyes through his visions, visions that entail a rich script of which he gives us a snapshot so that the viewer can also participate. and final creator, since it causes us to evoke our own meanings and vision before the painting. That is why we find ourselves before creations of masterful execution that are not closed, they are impulses that come to us from his heart to provoke ours...
PRIOR self-taught painter, born in Puertollano in 1933, moved to Madrid in 1954 where he resides to this day. In 1958 he won the National Exhibition Award for Painters of Africa and traveled through Europe, visiting the great museums, being dazzled by expressionism; an expressionism that, as can be seen in the portrait of his mother painted in 1949, was already innate and it is from this trip that he decided to express his painting in a less realistic and more personal way, following the dictates and impulses of his heart. and not from his mind.
Throughout his career and up to the present, José Hierro, Castro Arines, Sánchez Camargo, Corredor-Matheos, Figuerola-Ferretti, Carlos García-Osuna, Luis López Anglada, M. A. García Viñolas, Fernando Ponce, Corredor have written about his work. Matheos, Gianna Prodán, Rodríguez Alcalde, María José Carrasco Campuzano, Campoy, Carlos Arean, Felicidad Sanchez Pacheco, José Rivero, Agapito Maestre, Tomas Paredes.
José Hierro referred to his painting, “Manuel Prior has something that he has always needed in art: personality.” “His painting of him is intelligence wanting to restrain instinct”
Corredor Matheos defined his pictorial style as “a new figuration coming from informalism and traditional figurative painting orchestrated by a great expressionist temperament.”
Fernando Ponce, framed his style: “…If we had to frame Prior's work we would have to place it in the current of universal expressionist painting…”
María José Carrasco Campuzano: “….His painting of him is an avant-garde within the avant-garde… it is a work that is always alive and will never die, it will always have its future…”
Felicidad Sánchez Pacheco: “…It is a language created to renew the mechanisms of perception…”
Agapito Maestre: “…Prior's painting is an emotional canon, a wisdom of the soul, a unique way of seeing, appreciating and judging the evolution of expressionism, cubism and other classical and modern pictorial styles…”
José Rivero: “…It is a kind of personal legacy and social and cultural frieze that is given to us to contemplate and question”
Tomás Paredes indicates: “… There are those who defend his initial realistic painting – clear and firm – of him, but that was a stage prior to others. Where Prior shines is in his idiolect, in that deformation of bodies where the soul is empowered... ..In the history of contemporary Spanish figurative expressionism, which Carlos Areán studied in part, there are still many threads to be tied up. Within that world in which the names of Solana, Luis García-Ochoa, Álvaro Delgado, Francisco Mateos, Quirós, Barjola enter and leave... PRIOR has its own space, looking at that domestic base, but more at the international panorama, with a view put on Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele or Rouault…”
The exhibition setup is designed so that the visitor can live the following experiences:
• Cause the viewer, at first glance, to be immersed in the forest of shapes and colors of the world of PRIOR; a wild and exquisite world, hard and tender, dramatic and joyful that will fill us with emotion through its rich symphonies of shapes and color, and feel at first impact the roar of its fiery gestures.
• Involve the visitor in the dialogue and sensual song of his paintings.
• Awaken in the viewer curiosity and interest in
investigate how the development of his pictorial career has been and how he is able to reach his required expressive level.
Upon entering the first room of the exhibition we find a representation of his “Christs” series. The painting "Golgotha" shows us what until now no one has dared to represent: the dehumanization, humiliation, mockery, contempt that Jesus suffered on the cross for those he came to save.
In front of the Christs, we can see representations of dances, dancers and figures with the intention of paying tribute to the Lord of Heaven through rhythm, music and color, in a celebration of life.
As he represents in his paintings about the Corpus Christi of Camuñas, dances that adopted the argument of Autos Sacramentales offering a good tribute of rhythm and music.
We will see both one of his masterful paintings “Camuñas” about this festival, as well as his previous drawings to capture everything that impressed him and was recorded in his retina during his visit to this impressive celebration, and that helped him paint with great strength and vigor. his characters and dances, representing them just as he lived and felt them.
Continuing the visit through the different rooms, we will see both urban and human landscapes, evoking Toledo and Madrid, with paintings that bring us the atheleia and crackling of the capital. And we will feel attracted by the masks and polychromes in his paintings about the circus world and carnivals, as well as in the representation of his series about love relationships, families, couples. Disturbing and entertaining us with his series about Halloween, which he calls “Yalowen” (You see it) as a satire on the adoption of a custom foreign to our traditions and a satire on existing social realities, painted as criticism with a humorous key.
As for the drawing, the visitor will be able to appreciate its evolution from a very perfectionist technique in the formal execution and mastery of the drawing, to absolute freedom where the drawing is made with Indian ink in a single execution and without lifting the brush from the paper. These inks belong to his Petroleum Series, which he has been developing since its inception and which he still continues to complete.
He calls this series Petroleum for several connotations: for the technique that uses black Chinese ink with a brush, for the Puertollano oil refineries, and because it considers human beings and their lives as the greatest universal value that exists.
Key works exhibited in the exhibition.
Considered as an Avant-garde creator within the Avant-garde itself, he has managed to synthesize the pictorial world in such a way that he is positioned as a universal expressionist painter, since his painting is valued as a synthesis of the history of painting.
He begins to make his way in the field of realistic figuration with painting representations of a social nature, being interested in the mysteries and experiences of the mining social world that has surrounded him since his childhood and that will mark his continuous interest in the existences of people, their lives and its cultural, landscape, urban environments...
From this stage, the paintings “The Vote” and “Saturday Afternoon” (colloquially called “The Drunkards”), from 1951, stand out. In this painting, with an exquisite realistic and vibrant technique, he represents a group of miners, residents of his street. , having fun after his day in the mine. As he himself details, they are painted from life, previously making a sketch drawing of the composition he wanted and portraying them, posing one by one, in the small patio of his house, and inventing the background and the tavern atmosphere that surrounds them. This painting, like “The Vote,” already has an unmistakable seal of his painting: the movement and life that PRIOR always achieves in his creations.
This painting, as we can see throughout the entire exhibition, is the representation of an instant, a snapshot full of movement and life that contains a rich script, managing to tell us and transmit many messages to us and all of this through the emotions of its characters. or scenes, whether they are of festivity, joy, drama... he is a master at bringing us the emotions and feelings behind the apparent reality, emotions that in many cases go unnoticed by our eyes, but by delving into that reality we He brings them through his paintings, REVEALING WHAT REALITY HIDES with his mixtures of brave, dense, clean strokes; in its drag of colors that manage to light up and fill the canvases with movement, as we can see in Los Caretones, Camuñas, Familia Verde, El Beso, Gólgota, El Vito, La Sandía, Desde Cibeles
The portrait “To my mother” painted in 1949 and recently discovered when selecting this exhibition, is a key piece to understand the origin of his expressionism. Taking into account that he painted this painting when he was 16 years old and without having received any painting or drawing class, with this painting we discover how he naturally already internalized a way of painting that was more expressive and vigorous than realistic, and how innately he He used his brave, dense and clean strokes so characteristic of his painting. But due to his interest in learning and researching, in a self-taught way, through the great painters of the Spanish tradition, whom he considers his teachers and calls "The Magnificent 5": Zurbarán, Murillo, Velázquez, Goya and El Greco ; He decided to put aside that innate expressive and temperamental style to practice a more formally realistic painting until, with his trip in 1958, through Germany and Austria, he made contact with the European expressionists and decided to bet on the courage to evolve towards his personal experimentation of forms and rich polychromes and loose and dynamic brushstrokes and give free rein to the expressionist dictates of his heart.
“Pintan Bastos” 1974. At this stage he focuses on giving greater expressiveness to his figures, transforming their hands and faces, breaking with any academic norm. It is the starting point to deconstruct everything that he ties academically and focus on expressing the silent cry of the people, their fears and their anxieties, mixed with their desire to smile and make fun of the life they have been given. With an execution of the figures without adhering to orthodoxies, and where the effectiveness of the image lies in the graphic tension and in the purpose of a voluntary deformation that fills the human drama and that of the painting itself with meaning.
Starting in the 80s is when we see his consolidated style, his palette and execution of brushstrokes and composition are increasingly more avant-garde with a unique and very personal style.
Achieving a painting that is based on abstraction but an abstraction that he carves with his brushstroke creating the forms that finally show us an expressionist figuration.
“Golgotha” is one of his most emblematic paintings of this period, showing us what until now no one has dared to represent in the crucifixion of Christ:
In the painting Jesus is nailed to the cross, still alive, on Mount Golgotha. And around him several characters dance rejoicing at his death, with grimaces and mockery.
The demon jumps and cheers in triumph, representing evil, the naked woman provoking him represents the life that he will no longer enjoy, belittling him with provocations and mockery, the figure at his feet is laughing at him, on the right an angel appears defeated, collapsed , defeated and a woman pushes him away from Jesus and the scene, representing how the worst of the human being overcomes goodness. To the left of Jesus is the figure of a Roman soldier with an attitude of stupor before the scene of that group, as if trying to protect him, it is not God who protects him by freeing him from that suffering, it is a Roman soldier who ends his agony by stabbing him. sword in the side
With the triptych "San Fermines 2022" we enjoy a very impressive expressionist evolution, through total freedom where abstraction reigns, PRIOR makes us delight and enjoy discovering and recognizing scenes and moments of the San FermInes celebration.
These pieces are considered by critics as the culmination of his career, he manages to achieve the most difficult yet, a figurative expressionist abstraction... In these paintings we see an abstraction already absent from the carving that outlines the figuration, stains, polychromes in a dance of chaos perfectly orchestrated and harmonized to show us scenes of the San Fermines in an extremely passionate way: the chaos of the races and the bulls, fallen and trampled characters, others standing or sitting on a bull... They are considered masterful pieces not only for the technique developed but also for being made at the age of 89, an age that does not prevent him from continuing to investigate and achieving a modernity and freshness worthy of the vitality of a young man who lives and expresses himself in a contemporary way. more current and evolved. Taking to the maximum exponent how the complexity of his work requires the viewer to feel attracted by more than one look at the canvas, since in each of his glances the painting is reborn and each time this happens, a new contribution appears, a new discovery to the observer of the painting.
A tribute to PRIOR's career
Manuel Prior is considered the universal painter par excellence, his only ability to combine and cross pictorial boundaries with his art, human and universal, pictorially tearing his fabrics with the tragicomedy of the world but mythologizing it with a smile. Magic operates in him, because he has achieved what is truly difficult: remaining present in constant, honest and continuous evolution.
This exhibition, a tribute from Castilla-La Mancha to the pictorial career and contribution to contemporary art of Manuel Prior; It is the exhibition of an expressionist who transcends the regional, the national to locate himself in an area of high plastic and emotional interest. It can be enjoyed in the rooms of the Santa Cruz Museum until May 5, we encourage you not to stop enjoying this impressive experience.
Author: Margarita Prior Ruiz,
Curator of the exhibition. Degree in fine arts
Manuel Prior "Los borrachos - ("Tarde de sábado")" - The drunks ("Saturday afternoon") 1951
From cultura.castillalamancha.es/culturaenredclm/prior-corazon...
The exhibition “PRIOR 70 years of painting, revealing what reality hides” compiles paintings of all the themes and series that it has carried out, and where it proposes a journey into the heart of its creator that he has been able to capture pictorially. a very personal, unique and recognizable universe in a continuous investigation and renewal in the search to show his own creative vision, represented by his hands in a masterful way.
His technique and pictorial style, the wisdom of his hands and, above all, his gaze show us human landscapes, situations and life experiences, from a point of view not discovered by the majority.
His creations are poetic and musical compositions of the emotions and fundamental values of the human being, which he puts before our eyes through his visions, visions that entail a rich script of which he gives us a snapshot so that the viewer can also participate. and final creator, since it causes us to evoke our own meanings and vision before the painting. That is why we find ourselves before creations of masterful execution that are not closed, they are impulses that come to us from his heart to provoke ours...
PRIOR self-taught painter, born in Puertollano in 1933, moved to Madrid in 1954 where he resides to this day. In 1958 he won the National Exhibition Award for Painters of Africa and traveled through Europe, visiting the great museums, being dazzled by expressionism; an expressionism that, as can be seen in the portrait of his mother painted in 1949, was already innate and it is from this trip that he decided to express his painting in a less realistic and more personal way, following the dictates and impulses of his heart. and not from his mind.
Throughout his career and up to the present, José Hierro, Castro Arines, Sánchez Camargo, Corredor-Matheos, Figuerola-Ferretti, Carlos García-Osuna, Luis López Anglada, M. A. García Viñolas, Fernando Ponce, Corredor have written about his work. Matheos, Gianna Prodán, Rodríguez Alcalde, María José Carrasco Campuzano, Campoy, Carlos Arean, Felicidad Sanchez Pacheco, José Rivero, Agapito Maestre, Tomas Paredes.
José Hierro referred to his painting, “Manuel Prior has something that he has always needed in art: personality.” “His painting of him is intelligence wanting to restrain instinct”
Corredor Matheos defined his pictorial style as “a new figuration coming from informalism and traditional figurative painting orchestrated by a great expressionist temperament.”
Fernando Ponce, framed his style: “…If we had to frame Prior's work we would have to place it in the current of universal expressionist painting…”
María José Carrasco Campuzano: “….His painting of him is an avant-garde within the avant-garde… it is a work that is always alive and will never die, it will always have its future…”
Felicidad Sánchez Pacheco: “…It is a language created to renew the mechanisms of perception…”
Agapito Maestre: “…Prior's painting is an emotional canon, a wisdom of the soul, a unique way of seeing, appreciating and judging the evolution of expressionism, cubism and other classical and modern pictorial styles…”
José Rivero: “…It is a kind of personal legacy and social and cultural frieze that is given to us to contemplate and question”
Tomás Paredes indicates: “… There are those who defend his initial realistic painting – clear and firm – of him, but that was a stage prior to others. Where Prior shines is in his idiolect, in that deformation of bodies where the soul is empowered... ..In the history of contemporary Spanish figurative expressionism, which Carlos Areán studied in part, there are still many threads to be tied up. Within that world in which the names of Solana, Luis García-Ochoa, Álvaro Delgado, Francisco Mateos, Quirós, Barjola enter and leave... PRIOR has its own space, looking at that domestic base, but more at the international panorama, with a view put on Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele or Rouault…”
The exhibition setup is designed so that the visitor can live the following experiences:
• Cause the viewer, at first glance, to be immersed in the forest of shapes and colors of the world of PRIOR; a wild and exquisite world, hard and tender, dramatic and joyful that will fill us with emotion through its rich symphonies of shapes and color, and feel at first impact the roar of its fiery gestures.
• Involve the visitor in the dialogue and sensual song of his paintings.
• Awaken in the viewer curiosity and interest in
investigate how the development of his pictorial career has been and how he is able to reach his required expressive level.
Upon entering the first room of the exhibition we find a representation of his “Christs” series. The painting "Golgotha" shows us what until now no one has dared to represent: the dehumanization, humiliation, mockery, contempt that Jesus suffered on the cross for those he came to save.
In front of the Christs, we can see representations of dances, dancers and figures with the intention of paying tribute to the Lord of Heaven through rhythm, music and color, in a celebration of life.
As he represents in his paintings about the Corpus Christi of Camuñas, dances that adopted the argument of Autos Sacramentales offering a good tribute of rhythm and music.
We will see both one of his masterful paintings “Camuñas” about this festival, as well as his previous drawings to capture everything that impressed him and was recorded in his retina during his visit to this impressive celebration, and that helped him paint with great strength and vigor. his characters and dances, representing them just as he lived and felt them.
Continuing the visit through the different rooms, we will see both urban and human landscapes, evoking Toledo and Madrid, with paintings that bring us the atheleia and crackling of the capital. And we will feel attracted by the masks and polychromes in his paintings about the circus world and carnivals, as well as in the representation of his series about love relationships, families, couples. Disturbing and entertaining us with his series about Halloween, which he calls “Yalowen” (You see it) as a satire on the adoption of a custom foreign to our traditions and a satire on existing social realities, painted as criticism with a humorous key.
As for the drawing, the visitor will be able to appreciate its evolution from a very perfectionist technique in the formal execution and mastery of the drawing, to absolute freedom where the drawing is made with Indian ink in a single execution and without lifting the brush from the paper. These inks belong to his Petroleum Series, which he has been developing since its inception and which he still continues to complete.
He calls this series Petroleum for several connotations: for the technique that uses black Chinese ink with a brush, for the Puertollano oil refineries, and because it considers human beings and their lives as the greatest universal value that exists.
Key works exhibited in the exhibition.
Considered as an Avant-garde creator within the Avant-garde itself, he has managed to synthesize the pictorial world in such a way that he is positioned as a universal expressionist painter, since his painting is valued as a synthesis of the history of painting.
He begins to make his way in the field of realistic figuration with painting representations of a social nature, being interested in the mysteries and experiences of the mining social world that has surrounded him since his childhood and that will mark his continuous interest in the existences of people, their lives and its cultural, landscape, urban environments...
From this stage, the paintings “The Vote” and “Saturday Afternoon” (colloquially called “The Drunkards”), from 1951, stand out. In this painting, with an exquisite realistic and vibrant technique, he represents a group of miners, residents of his street. , having fun after his day in the mine. As he himself details, they are painted from life, previously making a sketch drawing of the composition he wanted and portraying them, posing one by one, in the small patio of his house, and inventing the background and the tavern atmosphere that surrounds them. This painting, like “The Vote,” already has an unmistakable seal of his painting: the movement and life that PRIOR always achieves in his creations.
This painting, as we can see throughout the entire exhibition, is the representation of an instant, a snapshot full of movement and life that contains a rich script, managing to tell us and transmit many messages to us and all of this through the emotions of its characters. or scenes, whether they are of festivity, joy, drama... he is a master at bringing us the emotions and feelings behind the apparent reality, emotions that in many cases go unnoticed by our eyes, but by delving into that reality we He brings them through his paintings, REVEALING WHAT REALITY HIDES with his mixtures of brave, dense, clean strokes; in its drag of colors that manage to light up and fill the canvases with movement, as we can see in Los Caretones, Camuñas, Familia Verde, El Beso, Gólgota, El Vito, La Sandía, Desde Cibeles
The portrait “To my mother” painted in 1949 and recently discovered when selecting this exhibition, is a key piece to understand the origin of his expressionism. Taking into account that he painted this painting when he was 16 years old and without having received any painting or drawing class, with this painting we discover how he naturally already internalized a way of painting that was more expressive and vigorous than realistic, and how innately he He used his brave, dense and clean strokes so characteristic of his painting. But due to his interest in learning and researching, in a self-taught way, through the great painters of the Spanish tradition, whom he considers his teachers and calls "The Magnificent 5": Zurbarán, Murillo, Velázquez, Goya and El Greco ; He decided to put aside that innate expressive and temperamental style to practice a more formally realistic painting until, with his trip in 1958, through Germany and Austria, he made contact with the European expressionists and decided to bet on the courage to evolve towards his personal experimentation of forms and rich polychromes and loose and dynamic brushstrokes and give free rein to the expressionist dictates of his heart.
“Pintan Bastos” 1974. At this stage he focuses on giving greater expressiveness to his figures, transforming their hands and faces, breaking with any academic norm. It is the starting point to deconstruct everything that he ties academically and focus on expressing the silent cry of the people, their fears and their anxieties, mixed with their desire to smile and make fun of the life they have been given. With an execution of the figures without adhering to orthodoxies, and where the effectiveness of the image lies in the graphic tension and in the purpose of a voluntary deformation that fills the human drama and that of the painting itself with meaning.
Starting in the 80s is when we see his consolidated style, his palette and execution of brushstrokes and composition are increasingly more avant-garde with a unique and very personal style.
Achieving a painting that is based on abstraction but an abstraction that he carves with his brushstroke creating the forms that finally show us an expressionist figuration.
“Golgotha” is one of his most emblematic paintings of this period, showing us what until now no one has dared to represent in the crucifixion of Christ:
In the painting Jesus is nailed to the cross, still alive, on Mount Golgotha. And around him several characters dance rejoicing at his death, with grimaces and mockery.
The demon jumps and cheers in triumph, representing evil, the naked woman provoking him represents the life that he will no longer enjoy, belittling him with provocations and mockery, the figure at his feet is laughing at him, on the right an angel appears defeated, collapsed , defeated and a woman pushes him away from Jesus and the scene, representing how the worst of the human being overcomes goodness. To the left of Jesus is the figure of a Roman soldier with an attitude of stupor before the scene of that group, as if trying to protect him, it is not God who protects him by freeing him from that suffering, it is a Roman soldier who ends his agony by stabbing him. sword in the side
With the triptych "San Fermines 2022" we enjoy a very impressive expressionist evolution, through total freedom where abstraction reigns, PRIOR makes us delight and enjoy discovering and recognizing scenes and moments of the San FermInes celebration.
These pieces are considered by critics as the culmination of his career, he manages to achieve the most difficult yet, a figurative expressionist abstraction... In these paintings we see an abstraction already absent from the carving that outlines the figuration, stains, polychromes in a dance of chaos perfectly orchestrated and harmonized to show us scenes of the San Fermines in an extremely passionate way: the chaos of the races and the bulls, fallen and trampled characters, others standing or sitting on a bull... They are considered masterful pieces not only for the technique developed but also for being made at the age of 89, an age that does not prevent him from continuing to investigate and achieving a modernity and freshness worthy of the vitality of a young man who lives and expresses himself in a contemporary way. more current and evolved. Taking to the maximum exponent how the complexity of his work requires the viewer to feel attracted by more than one look at the canvas, since in each of his glances the painting is reborn and each time this happens, a new contribution appears, a new discovery to the observer of the painting.
A tribute to PRIOR's career
Manuel Prior is considered the universal painter par excellence, his only ability to combine and cross pictorial boundaries with his art, human and universal, pictorially tearing his fabrics with the tragicomedy of the world but mythologizing it with a smile. Magic operates in him, because he has achieved what is truly difficult: remaining present in constant, honest and continuous evolution.
This exhibition, a tribute from Castilla-La Mancha to the pictorial career and contribution to contemporary art of Manuel Prior; It is the exhibition of an expressionist who transcends the regional, the national to locate himself in an area of high plastic and emotional interest. It can be enjoyed in the rooms of the Santa Cruz Museum until May 5, we encourage you not to stop enjoying this impressive experience.
Author: Margarita Prior Ruiz,
Curator of the exhibition. Degree in fine arts