Isidre Manils. The concealment and revelation of the world of images

Isidre Manils (Mollet del Vallès, 1948) exhibits again at the Vila Casas Foundation and does so with Fora de camp , curated by Natàlia Chocarro. A walk between painting and cinema, the two great arts of the gaze, as the artist comments. A world of the cinematic eye of an artist with a career spanning half a century.

This exhibition title transports us to Deleuze's hors-champ , which refers us to what is not seen or heard, and yet it is perfectly present. A game of concealment and revelation that is very present in Manils, through a journey with moving images, fleeting works that pass in a time, images that propose a different reading, a continuous walk and stop in front of each work, already that Manils makes you stop with the pretense of provoking this immobility to arrive at the observation of this time, of these filmic or videographic images that give a temporary meaning to the viewer's gaze.

Complete or fragmented images, in total dialogue with the support and with the works, also with the past, starting with the Ateneo de Mollet cinema or this initial game of glances between the series Couplings of the year 1979 that form polaroid pieces and the film. 91 m film all combined with the music of James Custodio. Past and present.

These first pieces transport you to the way of creating in Manils, as their creative landscape are the images you find and that can be seen in magazines or newspapers waiting to be manipulated one day. A process that cuts, collects, collects all kinds of evidence of a reality that will make visible in the work, all combined with a light that is also very characteristic in the artist from Vallès, because it is the basis of painting and also cinema commenting that “color is light and light is the matter of painting and cinema”.

But the spectator faces a discovery in the form of constructions that fragment horizontally, images that make the feeling of being disconnected but that have parts in common, of a creation with different supports in which the painting rests, giving an image of discontinuity, such as the coupling series of recent years. There we see contrasting images, a mosaic of changing illusions, surfaces that clump together in images.

With the series Drawings , human representations that fade with chiaroscuro and give material lightness, we arrive at Palimpsest , also the element of contemporaneity, to find ourselves in front of Croma , which must be observed with 3D glasses.

An ending created for this exhibition tour and which gives its name to the exhibition, Fora de camp , a concept we had already seen in the series of drawings, to merge with La persistència de la mirada , an audiovisual by Pol Penas in the workshop of the artist. A conjunction in the form of a coupling of sensations. An invisible bond of great expressive will.