Manuel Duque (1919-1998) was born in the locality of Nerva in Andalusia in 1919, into a family of humble origins who worked in mining, in the international context of the recovery that followed the First World War. Soon after he was born, his family moved to France, to the mining region of Saint-Étienne, later returning to Spain to finally settle in the town of Sabadell.
In this exhibition featuring some seventy works, we can see the creative process Duque followed after arriving in Paris in 1954 with the intention of seeking artistic truth. To his surprise, he found himself in a setting he found confusing, as he was convinced that after Dadaism and specifically the figure of Duchamp (1887-1968), nothing was really new or ground-breaking any more. Disappointed, he set out on his own journey of discovery with the goal, as he himself put it, of “rehabilitating painting,” or, “in other words, turning the hourglass over again and replacing realist doctrine with idealism.”
From 1954, at the age of 35, he went to live in Paris thanks to his savings from giving French classes and the help of his artist friend from Sabadell Joan Vilacasas (1920-2007), who already lived in the French capital. Though he combined the responsibility of a job with his art, this was the beginning of his creative career, with a scrupulous exercise in introspection: he decided to start from zero, to destroy himself (as he put it) to efface any intellectual content and dedicate himself to feeling the motions of his most profound being. He needed to be reborn and was to do this arm in arm with nature, blending back into it to form a single unit.
This initial stage (1954-1958) was one of ups and downs, his starting point, with gestural brush strokes in mixtures of black and white (Indian ink and gouache on paper or card), rejecting other media. Despite his efforts to remove any outside influence, he fell for the lyrical abstraction of the artists he discovered in the most youthful galleries in Paris at the time (Dubuffet, Mathieu and Hartung, among others).
In 1958 Duque met the art critic Julien Alvard (1916-1972), who was impressed by his work, leading to an invitation to join an exhibition of nuagiste artists. This was his break, and he was inevitably included in this group, even though he rejected it because he did not identify with it. He therefore preferred to cut himself off and go it alone, evolving towards a second stage in which his admiration for the London painter Turner (1775-1851) was vital. The consequences were far from trivial, as he added colour to his work and accepted the importance of the brush stroke. Primary colours appeared in monochrome or dichrome compositions, with a certain timidity and falling back on a transparency that became stronger over time.
By coincidence, in 1958 he also met, in Rome, the American painter Cy Twombly (1928-2011) who, coming from action painting, had evolved towards a language of his own similar to a kind of writing, in his admiration for another American artist, Mark Tobey (1890-1976), the creator of a visual code with resemblances to oriental calligraphy. In both cases we are talking about a pictorial graphic design, a style that Duque was to incorporate in his third stage, adding strong gestural lines.
The final stage Duque talks about began in 1962, when he felt the need to add a new element that he ended up calling “the theme”, with clear references to his beloved nature. From this decade onwards he exhibited in Sabadell, where he was well-received as someone who had left and then come back with the prestige of success. Thus, he became an artistic reference for other artists from Sabadell such as Josep Llorens (1892-1980), Joaquim Montserrat (1950-2016) and Romà Vallès (1923-2015).
Duque continued his process of research until in his final years of painting he abandoned abstraction to approach the realism which he had avoided at the start, inviting him to rethink painting.