'Sueño de una noche de Manolo' by Manolo Sierra in the new Secret Mill space

On August 23 at 6:00 p.m., the new temporary retrospective exhibition of the artist Manolo Sierra (Cádiz, 1973) Sueño de una noche de Manolo was inaugurated in the new creative space Secret Mill in Sant Pere Pescador, which opened your doors with this sample.

The exhibition, which revolves around Sierra's dream visions, also deals with Sierra's almost two-decade relationship with the creation space. The Secret Mill, with a secret location, was inaugurated behind closed doors and occupies a total space of almost 300 m². The initiative for this project arises, mainly, from the need to restructure the cosmos after chaos. The British producer and creative Nic Alderton, director of the project, points out that "there were two events that changed the course of 'Secret Mill': the Glòria storm and the effects of the pandemic that endemically swept the reality of our present.

The weather events weakened the structures of the house until the wing that served as Manolo Sierra's creative studio was destroyed, endangering the wing that is still standing. Chaos also lurked, in the same way, isolating the population for almost three years." The current history of the 'Secret Mill' begins with Manolo Sierra's artistic residency for almost two decades in the building. For the artist, this has been his place of exploration, inspiration, abstraction and teaching.The old mill, accompanied by a new environment around it, has kept Manolo Sierra's dreamlike visions and landscapes as a study and research space artistic. Nevertheless, the ruin of the space due to meteorology, added to the two years of confinement, stopped the painter's creative activity in the studio. The artist was forced to stop using the his place as he had done until then. The future presented the need to rebuild and regenerate... In this way the first discussions about the relationship of the place with the artist and vice versa were born which gave rise to the inauguration by twofold which was held this past August 23.

A space without a roof

The new space has 'the Secret Team', made up of British producer and creative Nic Alderton, art historian and art advisor Thaïs Botinas and art producer Tania Hirte, who came up with a plan to rebuild the Secret Mill and decided to open a parallel space that functions as a private gallery, a hidden workshop and a secret place. About the exhibition "Manolo's A Midsummer Night's Dream", this makes direct reference to William Shakespeare's work, A midsummer night's dream (1596).

The collection presented by 'Secret Mill' recovers the magical and dreamlike components of some of the author's unpublished works. Like Shakespeare's comedy, Manolo Sierra's paintings present states of mischief, imagination, the unknown, inhospitable within the recognizable, phantasmagoria and an aura of magical realism that baffles the viewer. In the words of Ignasi Rifé, philosopher and director of the ELEA School of Philosophy, Manolo Sierra's compositions invite you not to see in order to see more: "this exhibition invites you to close your eyes to observe more and better, to recreate the sensations experienced and internalize the contemplated work. In Sierra's works there is a silence that fills everything, that hypnotizes and invites you to let yourself be carried away." For her part, Tania Hirte affirms that "Manolo's Night Dream talks about intimacy and its physical impediment. Intimacy enhances the representational values of each artist and their aesthetic imagination.

Thus, the reflection on space invites us to construct an explanatory account of the mundane and everyday life of everything that makes up the trinity of artist-work-space. Contemporary aesthetic culture presents a notion of intimacy that evokes closeness, comfort and familiarity, while it can also acquire a problematic, inconclusive and suspicious meaning. Domestic spaces are also conceived as enclaves to understand and approach the true life of the artist, the intimacy that is part of "real" life and not the performative universe, but these stories about the "next" life must not be entirely true..."

Visiting times in the space are every afternoon in August from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (except Mondays) and visits will be arranged during the last weeks of August and the month of September.