Manolo García: "Painting is my little life game while I'm off work"

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Manolo Garcia

creates.

Although he is on sick leave due to medical prescription due to his health problems, he suffers from mild heart inflammation, which keeps him temporarily away from the stage, he continues composing and, above all, painting.

"I paint more than ever" explains about what is the most unknown facet of him despite the fact that some of the paintings or colored photos of him have been the covers of his records and he has works from 45 years ago.

A hundred of them can be seen in the retrospective exhibition

at the

from December 2 in what will be the first exhibition of his artistic work in the capital.

Surrounded by packing boxes while preparing the move, he affirms that "now, even more than ever I have to paint", it is his way of reconnecting with a world that "changes very quickly and not necessarily for the better".

With Manolo each sentence is a verse.

How are you? I'm off work, resting.

For music, of course, since I keep painting.

I am preparing this exhibition that I had programmed for more than a year and that makes me feel that I am not out of the game.

My little game of life continues while I have stopped the musical part by medical prescription for a few months, resting.

But I can exercise painting.

I feel fine but I can't go out to run a marathon or do 20 kilometers by bike. More than 40 years painting and sculpting but is this your first exhibition in Madrid? I participated in a photography exhibition a long time ago but plastic arts is the first time .

It is true that I have worked in painting for many years but I did not dare to call myself a painter until 10 or 12 years ago.

You are in constant learning and you are never fully satisfied with your work, it is true that there is a line that you cross and you think that your artistic and plastic proposal has its own entity, it has a strength and with that illusion, you affirm and reaffirm yourself.

I think I have waited a bit for that time where I dare to exhibit in a room. It is a retrospective with more than 100 works. What will the public find? The feeling of a few decades.

From very naive drawings, very Pop Art from my beginnings to retouched photographs to what I am doing now, like some larger format painting.

Always in mixed technique, I work with oils, which is a marvelous technique with a powerful result but which has a difficult duende to master.

There are also the influences of the famous Madrid scene in some of my first-time drawings or my love for comics.

It is a review of my experiences, of searching for the light and a path through the 80s and 90s until the current years in which we live in a confusion that is reflected in the work. The artist cannot escape from his reality The musician can disguise the emotion more, what underlies the work of a musician can leave some doubt, you can interpret it in different ways.

The painter has it more difficult, he bares his soul more.

I am a painter looking for surrealism, he is one of my

The painter has it more difficult, bares the soul more.

I am a painter looking for surrealism, he is one of my

The painter has it more difficult, bares the soul more.

I am a painter looking for surrealism, he is one of my

and i like pretty much all

.

In painting it is more difficult to hide your state of mind, your emotion permeates the work.

It doesn't matter if you are abstract, your range, your color palette describes your vital moment.

In music it's different, you can see the feather duster a bit but you can alter reality, you can write things that aren't real.

In painting, what you paint is real. In music, creativity is external and in painting is it more intimate? The way of creating is more introspective.

The painter works alone and in that solitude there is a very deep intimacy.

The musical task is very different, you can work alone to compose, as is my case, but when translating it into a record there are teams behind it, such as sound engineers, musicians, etc.

The painting comes from another depth.

For many years I have painted with music and now since the pandemic I have done something strange:

I am painting without music.

A state of mind so interior arrives that nothing distracts me anymore.

I let go of the brush, the brushstroke, the roller, the sponge... you go with that blue or yellow, with that primary color and you look for that vividness.

The pandemic has given us grays and a strange sensation but it has made us rediscover ourselves. Is art the most authentic expression we have left? In art I found the authenticity of attachment and detachment to life.

The painting and the music are a small raft with a barrel of water and a biscuit, the basics to get by, and you cling to it when the sea gets rough and rough or calms down.

I cling to painting, to the feeling that time stands still in front of a work that you discover in a museum or a gallery and soak yourself in it all day.

, to the landscapers of Olot or the drawings of

and

.

I always regretted not studying fine arts, I did applied arts and I was a graphic designer when everything was physical, there were no computers.

I worked in advertising, it was not what seduced me the most and at the same time I was painting at home.

This retrospective shows my paddling over these years. Does the whole creative process fill you up or do you have a preference between music and plastic arts? Everything makes me live very intensely.

It gives meaning to my days.

I have always preferred to stay and paint at home since I was young than not to go out to parties on weekends.

I was more seduced by my self-proposition, it made me master of my time, I did not depend on others but on my desire to paint.

Nor have I been a young oyster in a world of my own, waterproof and watertight, not at all, I was always extroverted.

But that was my way of facing the world,

with the layer of my varnish that my paintings and my musical projects gave me.

The world is very good but it is not free, you have to face it, and I went out with my baggage, with my defense shell.

This morning I have been painting for five hours and the day has already been resolved, I have already come varnished. With the confinement you created more... In the last two years I have painted a lot.

The fact that you are confined, that unexpected and terrible situation makes you look for help in yourself.

Normally in everyone's life we ​​use the energy of others, we are all with everyone all the time, even in two dimensions with screens, contacting and moving in a chain of communication that is sometimes irreverent, sometimes bland, sometimes hard when you Stay away from physical contact.

In my last paintings I have been completely alone,

I have not had the opportunity to be distracted and I have had to look for the solution in myself, I had no one else to turn to.

The meaning of life in today's society is to hide the precariousness of everything.

In the paintings there is no precariousness, there is reality. And you capture that intense inner world in bright and colorful paintings... You have to be optimistic.

I can deal with dark or strange subjects but with a lot of light.

I get my inner demons out of their dark areas to air out.

I can have very tortured paintings but I am working with yellows, with reds, with primary colors.

We all seek light, nobody wants to live in a gray magma, we are moths.

My work always has that duality, I can have a slightly dark theme but work with bright colors.

I was going more to yellow than to black, although lately,

since the pandemic years, I am using more black, in hindsight it will be seen.

Hard events happen in life and as a painter you express your deepest interior, that's why you change the palette. Has the pandemic affected you? Of course, like everyone else.

And it continues to affect me.

We are being bombarded with information.

You see distressing images that upset you, as well as a planetary cacophony, where everything is in chaos and they tell you everything that is bad or they make it up.

We live in a pretty shitty society.

Of course it's up to you.

My brain is wired for four things, not 44 million things.

80 years ago, the latest technology my grandfather used was a hoe, a jug and a straw hat for the sun and all his concern was his little garden and a chicken coop to feed the family.

It was a subsistence economy.

He had a hard time of course,

but surely his brain was calmer than mine.

I have it very clear, they did not need psychologists, psychiatrists, pills, antidepressants.

Given all this, I have to paint because my brain works properly while I paint or make a song, it is using the neurons it needs. Creativity never gives up... If you are a creative person and feel that need from youth it would be rare for that to disappear from your life.

My need for creation is unalterable.

It is very personal, the need to create is attached to the person and sometimes disappears for a while, you panic if you have something more to say or communicate.

In any discipline, with any tool.

In my case I have always had that need, with few gaps or empty spaces.

When you finish a record you think, 'maybe I'm dry'

and you just have to let a little time pass, lead a normal life.

In the end it is your essence that commands.

Then there is the need to change, the artist has to mutate, to set challenges, he must fight with himself and fail with himself.

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