Manolo Sierra (Cadiz, 1973) has lived and worked in the Empordà for years, where he has formed a Catalan family and where he continues to dedicate himself to his “great issue,” painting. His studio has been around for two decades and, thanks to the encouragement of British producer and creative Nic Alderton and the art historian Thaïs Botinas, it has been a space with a life of its own since last summer: Secret Mill. Half covered and half open, this old mill in Sant Pere Pescador is simply magical and intoxicating: the paintings of the Cadiz native blend with the environment and vice versa. Sierra paints, but above all he draws.
In Manolo Sierra’s numerous travel notebooks, he crafts an entire world in the form of an emotional and visual dictionary: these are compilations as impossible as those made by John Wilkins, the character imagined by Borges who expanded the concept of the encyclopedia thanks to his infinite ability to subvert categories, change labels, and improvise the most unexpected taxonomies.
Large undertakings, however, almost always end in a great inferno: “Some of what we see lasts (...) but none of those fleeting things, which perhaps were others, matter,” wrote the author of El Aleph. He continued, “it matters to have felt that our plan, which more than once we mocked, really and secretly existed and was the universe and us.” It is like Manolo Sierra’s notebooks, which are both a self-portrait yet at the same time a universal atlas made of snippets of life that he distills thanks to an almost innate sensitivity for art and an ability to draw from remote Renaissance resonances.
The notebooks are significant because Manolo Sierra’s entire creative adventure could ultimately form part of a single book: his native landscape blends with the landscapes he has discovered during his journeys through the Americas – from Patagonia to Mexico – and, in a much more subtle way, with the places he has always imagined. “Ever since I was young,” Sierra explains, “I liked to imagine that the landscapes I saw were from distant places: if I saw a pine, I thought I was in Canada; if I looked at the sea, I moved towards the opposite direction.” It was a matter, Sierra claims, of freeing his mind in search of the forms and stimuli necessary to be able to continue traveling. In his case, this verb is synonymous with living.
Knowing this, it is much easier to delve into his painting: the overlapping of apparently contradictory plans; the coexistence of areas perfectly described from a figurative point of view with large territories devastated by a tsunami of color; staggered horizons crowned by bipolar skies; spontaneous trickles contested by the vague lines of the most meditated drawing; automatic gestures bounded by the most elementary compositional rules; the silence of empty and open spaces beset by the jazzy and hyperchromatic cacophony of Sierra’s most uninhibited self. All this coexists in a rare form of balance that is only possible within the autarchic space of a work of art.
Perhaps it is for this reason, for this taste for spaces of representation that pass their own laws, that people seated at tables often appear in Manolo Sierra’s paintings: like the characters in The Symposium, understood as a form of socialization and knowledge, Sierra’s works exist with that rare aristocratic dignity typical of a species in danger of extinction and, at the same time, with the disturbing fragility that accompanies the gamut of human constructions. After all, painting can be understood as a vessel of life and, as Borges said, as the imminence of a revelation that may never end up happening.
