Manuel Ángeles Ortiz

MANUEL ANGELES ORTIZ (Jaén, 1895 - Paris, 1984).
"Valparaíso".
Ink on paper.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 37,5 x 26,5 cm; 60 x 48 cm (frame).
Manuel Ángeles Ortiz was an essential artist in the renovation of the art in Spain throughout the decade of the twenties and until the Civil War in Spain. He lived for a long period in Paris (1922-1933), but without losing contact with the artists living in Spain, and later went into exile in Buenos Aires (1939-1948), returning in the 1950s to take up residence in Paris, this time definitively. Since his first stay in Paris, Pablo Picasso's imprint on his work is profound. His painting shows the same alternation of languages (late Cubism, line drawing and round and monumental volumes of classical inspiration, etc.), a symptom of the different approaches to a return to order promulgated by different voices, from Cahiers d'Art to Jean Cocteau or Amédée Ozenfant. He was an independent artist, difficult to classify stylistically, as he did not stop experimenting throughout his career, although he rejected abstract painting. That is why he is attracted to surrealism for "its enigmatic lyricism, not its morbid aberrations of psychotic subjection", as he himself points out. The same thing happens in Buenos Aires, his series of woods are not found objects, but pieces worked according to his own intuitions. All this is linked to the tradition of the poetics of the primitive, developed by artists such as Benjamin Palencia, Angel Ferrant, or Alberto Sanchez, but also by Paul Klee, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi. From the fifties onwards, landscape and the human figure persist in his work, but he approaches informalism.